The weird/upsetting thing is that CTO would go to the producer of a software his or her company use for free and despite having active communication lines open go behind the developer's back to have it removed from the very website they got it from.
I believe that the technical term here would be "dick move".
The world is full of people who are quick to jump to conclusions and refuse to give you the benefit of doubt.
I used to use a self hosted blog aggregation software (Gregarius) and put it up at www.mypersonalsite.com/blogs that was unlisted and unlinked to. It got 3 uniques/month for about 12 months. Then one day a company owner (a regular from the Joel on Software's forums -- a technical person) wrote a blog post linking to my site, calling me a spam blog, and posted my personal information. He sent my host a C&D, and also blocked my work IP (most of the local IBM office) from reading his blog.
From what I gather, he looked at his refer logs and saw I clicked through to his blog 2-3 times, went to the link and freaked out that I was displaying his RSS feeds.
I emailed him to try and clear it up, and was quite polite, but he kept being an asshole, accusing me of stealing his content and breaking the law. He threatened me with further action, and was condescending because I was 17. ("You should password protect your 'blog reader' as a learning exercise, then blog about it so you'll have content of your own and you won't have steal my content").
He never reached out to contact me. He just sent the C&D, wrote a nasty blog about me, and didn't even try. Once he jumped to conclusions, it was too late.
When harvesting news titles and displaying those like news.google is legal, I thought displaying a RSS feed from a blog site should be legal too! It's not?
Some people are like that. It's frustrating. But it's a good lesson that if you're wrong, you're wrong, nobody owes you a conversation about it and similar people in high stakes venues will deliver swift, harsh, uncompromising justice that can have devestating consequences.
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt
The only thing to add is great minds are more generous and less concerned with violent retribution to compensate for a lack of control in their own frustrated lives.
What is really B.S. in this is that you can make changes to history then force push changes to git to remove anything. Sure it sucks and Linus would hang you publicly if you did it, but you can do it. The biggest problem is in the forking part. I guess you'd have to contact everyone that had a fork.
If something is really offensive or stolen, it is tough as hell to remove all traces of it- anyone could have a copy. The lesson learned here is if you are that pissed off that someone shared it, the problem is that someone shared it, not the person who took it. Unless it is crack being given to a crack dealer, but that's different. Git repos aren't crack houses. Not usually. Ok, maybe some of them. But not many. Just one? Ok just one.
The CTO was likely saying "this sloppy developer isn't responding, I've got to escalate this somehow".
To me, this really emphasizes the importance of communications, followup (the human timeout and retry factor, especially when the Github people are hinting that they replied and it was somehow missed), and patience instead of kneejerk reactions.
I believe that the technical term here would be "dick move".