I think it's reasonable to assume that it belongs wholy to Uber and that he was acting illegally to publish it on github. He even showed us the sofa in the Uber office where he wrote it. He told us his manager asked him to write the code and seemingly had no idea that he'd written a database engine. He told us that they were paranoid of industrial espionage at the time. There seems to be zero reason to suspect that Uber carved out a specific exception to the usual employment contract enabling him to work on and release this code as FOSS while at the company.

Yeah, you want to get rid of uncertainty, but it's here to stay. The whole legal system is not brought to its knees over the fact that no code on GitHub (gasp) is automatically guaranteed to be safe against copyright infringement.

> It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie.

Yes, absolutely: presumption, not certainty. (Nitpicking the phrasing: presumption that the copyright is not a lie, the issue does not even venture into licensing.)

>Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims.

The lack of him saying he went to the effort of having Box or Uber license their code MIT suggests it.