Levandowski comes out of this fine. Google can't sue him. Google has an employee contract which forces employee disputes into arbitration. That arbitration has already happened and can't be reopened. The settlement terms are not public.
The LIDAR design is a side issue. There will be lots of good, low-cost LIDAR units as soon as someone is able to order a few hundred thousand of them. Continental's flash LIDAR will probably be the first successful mass-market flash LIDAR. Quanergy made a lot of noise, but never shipped. Now they seem to be pivoting from automotive to border security. (They want to make Trump's border wall a virtual one.) Tetraview has funding but no products. Velodyne has been making flash LIDAR noises but hasn't demoed yet. Innoviz has demoed an experimental unit and claims to be selling it. Meanwhile, Velodyne is trying to get their rotating devices down to $500 in quantity.
Same concept as TV remotes that frequently use a 36-38 kHz carrier. If they just gated the IR LED on and off at the baseband data rate, interference from room light would be a problem.
That's fine for a scanner, where you only need one copy of the electronics, but doing it for every pixel means something like a radio receiver behind each pixel. Still, you could probably do that now.
The SwissRanger [1], a short-range time of flight imaging camera, worked like that. It's been discontinued.
(I fooled around with this in the early 1990s, trying to build a laser scanner. Too many noise problems.)
Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.
It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.
I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.
Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.
Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.
I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.
When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.
The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.
I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?
While Levandowski repeatedly bit the hand that fed him, they continued to feed him.
but if you assume it's accurate, you've really got to wonder who's driving the bus. A few months ago it's "let's make this guy rich if this succeeds" and letting him start businesses on the side, and then all of a sudden it's the opposite. It would almost make one think that, maybe, everyone isn't so great at assessing impact and contribution of an individual. And if that's the case, maybe everyone should slow the roll on the whole fetishization of engineers/visionaries that's such a favorite pastime in the valley?
This entire story is mind-boggling.
So does this mean Waymo owes Uber damages, or payment for taking the problem off their hands?