But Piper is a reimplementation of perforce which makes me wonder why they couldn't just license it. Why does it make sense to do this. Perforce should scale to the level they're talking about. Google were using it even when they had many tens of thousands of developers and multiple changesets per second and presumably it got better since then
In the age of AI writing code, maybe the question flips from "why not license it" to "why not reimplement it"?
Google implemented Piper because Perforce simply didn't scale well. In the years since, P4 has barely improved at all. Licensing P4 would not help and Google doesn't offer Piper licenses.