That's not true, he was offended well before they outed the engineer. He actually never even mentioned the outing in the OP.

Gruber retweeted this at 1:41 AM on the 19th, 18 hours before the outing: "Here's an interesting fact: in California, the finder of a lost item is required to tell the police and turn it over to rightful owner."

He called it stolen on his first post about it, just after Gizmodo posted:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/19/gizmodo-rumors

So quite literally since he found out Gizmodo had the device he has been offended by it.