not the op. just my understanding is that it is raphlinus's code. It means Google has literally nothing to do with it, other than happening to own the code.

(IE it's not an experimental product, it's not a product at all. It's just raphlinus releasing some code)

You repeated the phrase different words.

The question begged is Why does Google own the code?

It is much easier as a Google employee to publish open source projects under Google's copyright[0] rather than getting them to grant the copyright to you.

To have Google give you (the Google employee) full copyright of projects you work on while at Google, you need to go through a committee[1] that reviews the project to make sure it doesn't collide with some other project Google already is working on. As this is really hard to do for many projects, it's easier to just let Google keep copyright ownership of it and have it opensource under them.

[0] https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/

[1] https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/

As a matter of principle this seems like a negative thing for open source. Can someone explain to my why it isn't?

I can't really see an argument to be had that it's not Google's property if it was worked while on the clock.

Considering how protective most companies are of IP, I'm shocked Google even has a mechanism by which a person can take back things they've worked on in office at Google.

Probably because he works on it on the clock.

Even if it's not on the clock, the open source contribution approval processs at Google is much easier (as another poster pointed out) if you just assign copyright to Google and host on the Google github (with the disclaimer that it's not official Google code).

It's actually a remarkably painless process, which is good because there's actually quite a bit of neat stuff in that neighbourhood of github as a result.