A company’s employees publishing open-source projects is, in general, good publicity. Choosing to be not associated would consist of them telling said employee not to use their @google.com account for publishing this project (unless there’s some other active publication of ‘this is by a Google employee’ that I don’t know about), and why would they bother doing that unless they thought this particular project would be bad publicity?
(Disclosure: I have been (and will be) a Google intern, which probably affects my priors here, but I do not believe this argument is dependent on non-public information.)
It’s not that Google allowed someone to potentially see the connection to Google, but that Google ensured that they (Google) would be associated with the project by informing the media. The story doesn’t say “omg through investigative reporting we found that Google paid for the creation of a bitcoin client” (remember, the 20% time is not “whatever you want”, but projects approved by management).
Ah, after chasing down the original announcement, I see that it does contain the phrase “Google is pleased to announce the release of BitCoinJ, …”. Still, that is a message from the original author of the software; it is neither a press release nor written by a different party at Google, which I would expect to see if Google was actually promoting or considering using Bitcoin or BitCoinJ.
A company’s employees publishing open-source projects is, in general, good publicity. Choosing to be not associated would consist of them telling said employee not to use their @google.com account for publishing this project (unless there’s some other active publication of ‘this is by a Google employee’ that I don’t know about), and why would they bother doing that unless they thought this particular project would be bad publicity?
(Disclosure: I have been (and will be) a Google intern, which probably affects my priors here, but I do not believe this argument is dependent on non-public information.)
It’s not that Google allowed someone to potentially see the connection to Google, but that Google ensured that they (Google) would be associated with the project by informing the media. The story doesn’t say “omg through investigative reporting we found that Google paid for the creation of a bitcoin client” (remember, the 20% time is not “whatever you want”, but projects approved by management).
Ah, after chasing down the original announcement, I see that it does contain the phrase “Google is pleased to announce the release of BitCoinJ, …”. Still, that is a message from the original author of the software; it is neither a press release nor written by a different party at Google, which I would expect to see if Google was actually promoting or considering using Bitcoin or BitCoinJ.