Hum... Rational (from the point of view of the entire enterprise) bureaucracy bodies probably exist, but they are not common. But that second part "something that could happen to anyone" is completely unfounded. It may be because of something that could happen to you, or it may not. There is no reason to assume either way.
As people keep ignoring on the context of software architecture, you are not Google.
Everyone has different reason to publish their code using open-source license. I like sharing my code but I don't like when multi-billion dollar company make a profit from it for example. Ofc, that's what I agreed to when I release my code under open-source license, but we are all free to have different sentiment about it.
A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g
Good call. I had somehow quite forgotten about it, though I know I read all the N-clause BSD variants a decade or so ago. I’ve added a section at the end with that as an alternative recommendation.
Google uses Sqlite, which is simply public domain. Did someone at Google actually purchase one of their pseudo-license 'warranty of title' documents they offer for companies (supposedly mostly in other countries that officially don't recognize PD grants) with more legal budget than sense? Google also uses SBCL, which is mostly public domain "in jurisdictions where this is possible, or under the FreeBSD licence where not." Does the entry for it in the list of third party software say Google is using it under the FreeBSD license or PD? (They also employ at least one developer who is a core maintainer on the side.)
The legal department's default answer is "no" to anything they haven't already said "yes" to, so it wouldn't surprise me if your default options are limited. But presumably with useful enough software under other PD-equivalent things they could be forced to say "yes". As an aside I'd be very interested to know the extent of internal audits Google does on its code for legal risks in un-cleared-by-legal dependencies, dependencies-of-dependencies, and presence of code derived from stack overflow/popular books/random places on the internet indexed by google.
