The JDBC substory is fantastic.

Google built a database, works great internally, all well.

They subcontract out to build an adapter layer for the wider world which doesn't work properly, so the wider world gets to use a crappy database. A carefully engineered core Google uses, wrapped in broken nonsense, creating an emergent whole that is unnecessarily rubbish. Noone internally notices they've done this and the external people are poorly placed to work it out.

That seems absolutely on point for Google's open source strategy.