I am assuming this does not apply to personal projects, but then why would you contribute Google code to something that you cannot use anyway due to licensing issues?
You will notice 6 missing years in commits to my personal github. That is why. Every "personal project" I did ended up in the Google repository instead.
So to cover that, typically law basically defaults on granting your company IP rights on anything you create anytime while you're an employee, and should there be need to challenge that, it's up to you to uphold in court that project X has nothing to do with your company business or tech, or to ensure beforehand that your contract has special provisions granting you IP rights in known situations.
† At the very least this is also the basis as to why software is not patentable in EU, unless they are an integral part of a very concrete process that itself solves an issue (e.g say you invent an industrial process that allows you to synthesize molecule X more efficiently, and that process involves a bit of code as an integral and required part of said process because it is deeply tied to it in a fundamental way, then that precise bit of software can be covered by the patent of the process)
The first draft of my current contract wanted a claim to all creative work produced, at all hours, on any equipment, in any medium. (e.g. the copyright on a photo I took on holiday would technically have been owned by my employer.)
They also wanted me to give up all "moral rights" which meant I could not say I created anything I did while being employed, and more worryingly, I could not say I didn't create something that the company said I did.
That clause got removed pretty damn quickly.
You can apply (the process is described on the same website as TFA) to have Google declare that a certain project definitely is not one of their businesses and therefore not covered. You could also make your own judgment, but (having talked to a lawyer about this when considering a Google offer) my impression is that that is a very bad idea and you should go through the process.
(I only know about the US-but-not-California version of the contract; it might be different in other jurisdictions.)
A very large number of contracts will be so much better and more slim, and a lot of people will not be harrassed by scare tactics.
"Do what the fuck you want" isn't even a good sentence, let alone a statement on what you can do, how your liability is limited, rules on naming and attribution, etc...
Questions like "Can I use this without attribution?", "Can I hold you liable for the code you wrote?", "Will you charge me for using this code?", "What does the license cover? (documentation? just the program? just source code?)", and "Who owns the copyright for this work?" are not answered by the license, leaving them all up in the air.
I'm not going to use code that someone can attempt to charge me for using later, and I'm not going to contribute to code that can cause me to be sued for my contributions not working.
I get the want for simple licenses, but I feel that licenses like MIT or Apache2 are simple enough to be understood by most people, and they fulfil all the checkboxes of a real license.
It's especially telling that the WTFPL contains a clause which calls out a lot of this information for the license text only (must be distributed verbatim or have the name changed, all are permitted to distribute it, and a copyright for the license text).
Just do what the fuck you want with everything in the repo. No copyright, if you want to say that you created the code and rebase all history, it's also your right. Feel free.
And it seems kind of obvious you can't hold the author liable for any trouble (though I don't know anything about law so maybe it's more complicated than it looks). Also it says in the FAQ that you can just add a warranty clause if you need one.
But legally it's not obvious. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't pretend to understand all of the concepts, but I believe there is a concept of "fit for purpose" where unless you specifically say otherwise, it is assumed that your "creation" will do what it says it will do, and if it fails to do that in a way that harms someone, you can be held liable. A company that makes ladders can't claim it's not their fault that it collapsed unless they put in very obvious and clear wording that the ladder has no warranty or purpose and they can't be held accountable. Similarly, your code that pads strings on the left is expected to do so, and if it doesn't and that causes harm to someone, then they could claim that you are liable for at least part of those damages.
Also, there is no such thing as "no copyright" in many parts of the world. IIRC in the US EVERYTHING has copyright automatically and until it expires, even if it's not declared. You can't "give up" your copyright, all you can do is license it. Again, i'm not a lawyer, but this is how I understand the system works.
Answers to those questions may seem obvious to a layperson, but they aren't to a legal system. And choosing to not participate in the legal shit doesn't mean you are immune to the law.
It's just too vague to be useful - legitimate questions such as "does it cover code only or documentation as well?", or "is the author disclaiming any warranties or liability that may be implied by the law?" are left unanswered.
There seems little reason to use it over e.g. MIT or FPL-1.0.0, both of which accomplish similar ends and are quite readable without introducing a bunch of uncertainty for both parties.
https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0
Also, the Google guidelines consider that WTFPL is recognised as open source by OSI, yet there seems to be some opinion from FSF people that it is free software (see [0] «Is the WTFPL a valid license?»).
To understand it, all you need to do is understand that some folks take actions based on ideological beliefs, often to the exclusion of pragmatism, knowingly or not.
The technicalities of the law are very complicated. Tiny mistakes can render a license unusable or just invalid. So, the best advice I can give any author is to stick to one of the well-known license, as this makes it very likely that the software can be used by others.
You really don't understand that sometimes people act idealistically, often to the exclusion of pragmatism? What don't you understand about it?
Please consider that not everyone has the same life priorities as you.