[frollogaston]

He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.

[mewpmewp2]

In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.

Even if he didn't do the proper process, this is just a CLI wrapper, and they should have made it proper after, not fired the person. And they should have thought long and hard why a person felt this had to be done. Or alternatively why was the person able to publish something as a new repository in their devrel github org if the release process is so vital for whatever reason.

Even if you have or had the legal right or whatever, it doesn't mean that you have to actually act on it. It speaks to some other sort of motivation to me.

[frollogaston]

It'll probably be both, they look on the inside but the employee is still fired. Doesn't matter if they decide later that the unofficial CLI is better than the real one, it's not justification to publicly break process.