"How? Where is the mutual consideration? WTFPL looks like a gratuitous license, rather than a contract."

So if i understand your argument, because you are required to do nothing under the license, it is not a contract for lack of consideration?

If so, this is an interesting argument.

Let me turn it around then: Why, in your view, do most public domain dedications then include disclaimers of warranty (including CC-0), if they are pointless?

As for the second, A. A vast number open source projects are sponsored or sold by merchants in the class of goods to which it belongs (consultants, companies people selling things on app stores, etc) B. You can sell something for zero dollars. C. For fitness, I specifically mentioned representations often made on mailing lists (IE as to whether the software would work for a given person)

The gratuitous license argument is interesting (though from what I can tell, legal minds greater than mind still feel the urge to disclaim warranties in that case), but the contract/sale one is just completely uninteresting to me, given the lengths courts have gone in the past.

> So if i understand your argument, because you are required to do nothing under the license, it is not a contract for lack of consideration?

Yeah, that's like the first week of Contracts.

> Let me turn it around then: Why, in your view, do most public domain dedications then include disclaimers of warranty (including CC-0), if they are pointless?

Standard-form gratuitous licenses (incl. public domain declarations) often are written under the assumption that the transfer of the covered work may occur as part of a sales transaction (e.g., sale of media containing the work) from the licensor to the licensee, which is a situation in which implied warranties may be applicable.

WTFPL is absolutely not suited for that use case, at least on its own, though nothing prevents you from including both the WTFPL and a warranty disclaimer.

> B. You can sell something for zero dollars.

You can't have a sale without a contract, and while you can have a contract without money changing hands, you can't have a contract with an intended two-way exchange of obligations. One party merely offering a limited waiver of some of its exclusive rights without asking anything in return that it wouldn't be entitled to anyway isn't a two-way exchange of obligations.

> The gratuitous license argument is interesting (though from what I can tell, legal minds greater than mind still feel the urge to disclaim warranties in that case), but the contract/sale one is just completely uninteresting to me

I don't think you understand -- they are exactly the same argument. A sale involves a contract. A license without a contract is gratuitous.

You can't be interested in the argument of whether p is true but not be interested in the argument of whether ~p is true.

"Yeah, that's like the first week of Contracts."

Now you are just being a dick. I"m trying to be nice here and make sure i understand your argument. In most cases, courts won't look at consideration at all, and outside of the US, whether consideration is required at all varies.

" you can't have a contract with an intended two-way exchange of obligations. "

This is false, of course. You can have unilateral contracts accepted by performance of something that a contract requests, contracts implied in fact, contracts implied in law, and all sorts of interesting quasi-contracts, plenty of which still have warranties.

But that's also "first week of contracts".

"I don't think you understand -- they are exactly the same argument. A sale involves a contract. A license without a contract is gratuitous."

Not in all cases, actually, but if you are going to act like you have above, i'm not horribly interested in continuing the conversation, we'll just see what happens when someone gets sued over the WTFPL.

> " you can't have a contract with an intended two-way exchange of obligations. "

> This is false, of course.

Except, not.

> You can have unilateral contracts accepted by performance of something that a contract requests,

You can have contracts accepted by performance as described, but they aren't unilateral. Acceptance by performance is a mechanism for demonstrating acceptance (hence the name) of a contract offer with mutual obligation while simultaneously fulfilling some or all of the obligations on one side.

> contracts implied in fact,

Which are contracts where the acceptance of mutual obligation (and perhaps the actual content of the mutual obligation) is inferred from non-verbal communication, not an exception to the requirement for an intended two-way exchange of obligations.

> contracts implied in law, and all sorts of interesting quasi-contracts,

quasi-contracts are another name for implied-in-law contracts, which are not actual contracts, but equitable arrangements; given the nature of the equitable basis for these -- particularly the direction they run -- it would be odd to see implied warranties, or even some equitable analog, mattering to them except to reduce liability that might be due to the provider. But equity can be be weird, so I wouldn't rule it out entirely that there might be some relevance there.

> But that's also "first week of contracts".

Indeed.