Being open source doesn't mean that you can contribute to it at all. In this particular case, Google does actually take contributions, but only from people who signed their CLA, and many people aren't going to agree to that.
What would happen if you throw a patch into their discussion without signing CLA and with WTFPL license? Can someone else take that patch and resubmit it with proper procedure? Sounds like a good approach if you want bug fixed but don't want to sign any agreements.
WTFPL is not a good license for the same reason that "public domain" isn't good. It's not actually recognized internationally. Copyright is the basis of viable international licenses and they need you to turn over the copyright to them (or license it to them or whatever their CLA says).
So, if you did that it'd probably be worse than useless because it might hamper the legal adoption of identical or near-identical code if the fix was such that there was essentially only one decent solution.
Comments
Being open source doesn't mean that you can contribute to it at all. In this particular case, Google does actually take contributions, but only from people who signed their CLA, and many people aren't going to agree to that.
What would happen if you throw a patch into their discussion without signing CLA and with WTFPL license? Can someone else take that patch and resubmit it with proper procedure? Sounds like a good approach if you want bug fixed but don't want to sign any agreements.
WTFPL is not a good license for the same reason that "public domain" isn't good. It's not actually recognized internationally. Copyright is the basis of viable international licenses and they need you to turn over the copyright to them (or license it to them or whatever their CLA says).
So, if you did that it'd probably be worse than useless because it might hamper the legal adoption of identical or near-identical code if the fix was such that there was essentially only one decent solution.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...
Google allows WTFPL third party code.
That probably complicates things from a legal perspective. I could imagine that that patch can no longer be submitted by anyone.