and people come to rely on that free licensing

  there was no reason to believe that the open source
  licensing was anything but company-sanctioned

What both these things seem to rely on, is the amount of time that has passed since the original open sourcing. It seems highly unlikely that they only discovered the open sourcing just now. If they had undertaken this action immediately after discovering the open sourcing, there would be no doubt that it wasn't company sanctioned and no-one would have come to rely on it.