I've never worked at Google either, but I have worked at other companies where people got in serious trouble for trying to open-source something that was associated with the company's IP. It's important to remember here that copyrights and patents are separate. A company might be very permissive when it comes to copyright (though woe betide the engineer who tries to open-source something related to trade secret IP) while still aggressively protecting their patents. Have you seen a Googler actually try to attach an explicit patent license to Google code? After Oracle, I'd be pretty surprised. The BSD/MIT non-license is the real stealth option here. It precludes no action by the patent holder, under any conditions, so of course your local legal department would have no problem with it.
1. Googler tells their director that they want to open source some code; the director approves it.
2. Googler tells the Open Source + Patents Office that they're releasing code. The OSPO says to use Apache as the license unless you have a good reason not to, and does a sanity check to ensure that the license information is in all the right places in the repo.
3. Googler posts the repo to GitHub.
Googlers don't usually even think about licenses. The OSPO says to use Apache, so that's what we use.
Do you suppose that neither the director nor the OSPO is checking which patents relate to the code under consideration, and that neither might reject the request on the basis that it would compromise valuable IP? It would actually be irresponsible for them not to. Given the value of that IP to the company, they have a duty to ensure that it's protected. The fact (if fact it is) that individual engineers don't worry about it means approximately nothing except that they're sheltered little pups.
