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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

This is mildly interesting coming out of google because I thought lisp wasn't a google-approved language.

(Yes, there are other projects on github in non-approved languages, but they appear mostly to allow 3rd party interop with google services. The educational nature of this project puts it in a slightly different category.)

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Lisp became a "language internally used by Google" when Google purchased ITA with a Lisp code-base so large and Lisp-only staff so large, that it is unlikely that it will ever be rewritten or that the staff will be retrained to use Java.

ITA had a small staff, and was not Lisp-only. They were hiring people to do Java work >5 years ago.

To be clear: This is a random googler's open source project, not anything official from Google.

The only reason it's part of the Google org is so that they didn't have to pay for a private project for staging.

Normally, in situations like this, they are supposed to have a disclaimer in the README that points out it's not official google anything (to avoid exactly the confusion that seems to have occurred here).

By default, Google holds the copyright to open-source projects released by Googlers. There's a review process for transferring copyright to the individual, but you don't have to go through it just to release something.

edit: See previous comments from DannyBee and cdibona here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4051325

Yes. The fact that we own some code doesn't mean it's officially supported. It just means we try to maintain accurate info.

I actually want to simply eliminate the copyright notices since they are legally pointless, but any time we've done it at scale it just generates lots of questions about ownership, even with clear info in README files, etc.

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