Yeah, I suppose they could create a separate org, "Google Open Source" and put it there, but probably they'd like to reserve the right to own and then change the "not official" to "official" whenever they please.
There are many lawyers and such at Google who think about these things more intensely than you and I do. I'm sure they have looked at all angles.
EDIT: I do find it amusing to watch HN and other forums whenever something new and interesting is dumped under the /google org and people need to be convinced it's not some radical new direction Google is taking. But I've also been wrong before. I dismissed Fuchsia as a personal hobby project that grew out of control, until it grew out of control enough that it rm -r'd everything I'd been working on for 2+ years.
I'm sure the lawyers looked at all the legal angles but I don't know if they thought about the perception. But on a scale from 1 to "what were they thinking" this is pretty minor.
There are many lawyers and such at Google who think about these things more intensely than you and I do. I'm sure they have looked at all angles.
EDIT: I do find it amusing to watch HN and other forums whenever something new and interesting is dumped under the /google org and people need to be convinced it's not some radical new direction Google is taking. But I've also been wrong before. I dismissed Fuchsia as a personal hobby project that grew out of control, until it grew out of control enough that it rm -r'd everything I'd been working on for 2+ years.