Many of the Googlers involved in the campaign against Project Maven are engineers of high caliber and those I know of are fairly activist in general. While I haven't always agreed with those I've interacted with, they're high quality people with high quality records. The sort of Googlers protesting Maven are the sort of Googlers who made Google the sort of company people loved. And they've put their careers on the line to make a statement about what is and isn't okay.

Sundar Pichai's claim to fame was getting the Google Toolbar installer (and later the Chrome one) injected into the Adobe Reader installer. [0]

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-did-Sundar-Pichai-do-that-his-pee...