I'm guessing that their job at Google allocates a significant percentage of their time to work generally on open source Git, with the rest on Google-specific needs and deployments like googlesource.com. This post on Google's open source blog fits squarely in the overlap of both.

As well, most of Google's releases in the developer tools, open source, or Cloud Platform worlds don't have ads - indeed GCP is an entire revenue stream not dependent on ads.

Source: Much of my day-job work on my last team at Google was open source on the GCP team, and I also got approval to own some side-project work done on my own time. So I got to see how they handle such things. I don't have specific knowledge of the Git team's arrangements, but this is an educated guess.

I guess others downvote you because your insinuation about how Google will sneak ads into an open source project. They've never done that before, so it is rather odd accusation.

They moved a bunch of open source functionality out of AOSP to force all-or-nothing adoption of their services + tracking.

Most likely it was noted because several of us probably immediately wondered why google would have taken it upon themselves to release a new version of something they weren't the maintainer of.

Google has as much incentive as anyone else to introduce a faster wire protocol. The article mentions the Chrome project, and don’t forget that Google Cloud has a git-repo-hosting product.

That's true, and while we all get to enjoy the new protocol, it seems like its primary beneficiary will be big organizations that have gigantic repos with massive numbers of refs in them. Furthermore, there's a clear orientation towards specialization -- putting that giant repo on a central server. Google clearly stands to benefit more from this work than those of us who use git as a distributed version control system. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

In all fairness, GitHub also has much to benefit from this too, playing host of the Mozilla git mirror, which also has a relatively large number of refs: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev

My first thought was “Ugh, Google forked git and now we’ll have two competing protocols”

So its good to know why this was posted on Google’s site.

Even if he does it on Google's time, all his contributions are still licensed under GNU GPL V2 so Google cannot claim any ownership over Git.

The GPL is a license, not a Contributor Agreement or a Copyright Transfer. The author remains the owner of the copyright when they let others use it under a license, even open source licenses like the GPL.

Licensing a software out does not mean the author can no longer "claim any ownership". In the case of OSS licenses, it just means that they can't claim sole ownership.

Yes, but from the perspective of the end user (me), the license guarantees that I can use the current version of the software for free forever without Google or anyone else forcing any changes.

Plus, if I don't like any changes they make, I can fork my own copy and continue developing on that (which the community will certainly do in a heartbeat if needed).

Yes, of course. I was just trying to clarify that that guarantee is due to the software being licensed to you and not because ownership gets transferred from the author.

so right now, Google has a word to say about the direction of git.... But that's normal.

It is mentioned because this announcement is hosted on Googleblog.