This is a remarkably flamey summary. I would have expected something more balanced from you.
To be very clear, Google did not buy godoc.org at all. The maintainer of godoc.org tired of taking care of it and approached us about taking it over. We agreed, to ensure that this important community resource remained available. We put in significant operational time keeping it running - it was not a zero-maintenance server.
When the time came to update godoc.org to support Go modules, it was clear that a lot would need to change - the old godoc code just didn't expect any of the concepts that modules added. So we wrote a new one instead of trying to evolve the old one in place, and when it was ready, we turned down the old one with appropriate redirects to keep links working.
The idea that we "bought" godoc.org "just to cancel and replace" it is incredibly incendiary and not even remotely close to true. I'm stunned to see you spreading misinformation like this.
As for licenses, Google has deep pockets and does not want to be sued for non-permitted use of other people's source code. Our lawyers have decided that displaying a derived work (the docs) on a commercial site (anything Google runs) is something we need an clear license for. It is not hard to make a clear statement that code is licensed to allow the specific uses that are otherwise reserved to the author in copyright law. The 0BSD and MIT-0 licenses are good examples of clear statements granting the necessary rights, with no actual restrictions on use. WTFPL is very much not that kind of clear statement: it does not explicitly grant the copyright-reserved rights. Google's lawyers do not have any interest in one day having to stand up in court and defend having made commercial use of some software by debating the exact legal meaning of 'what the fuck you want to'.
It also turns out to be fairly difficult, legally, to put something in the public domain. If just saying "I put this in the public domain" were enough, the CC0 license would not be so incredibly long [1]. pkg.go.dev does recognize and display CC0-licensed code.
Yes, godoc.org used to display docs for code using any license at all. That was almost certainly a mistake, one that went unnoticed during the transfer of godoc.org to Google. I'm glad that the copyright violations on that site never led to any legal action.
[1] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.
To be very clear, Google did not buy godoc.org at all. The maintainer of godoc.org tired of taking care of it and approached us about taking it over. We agreed, to ensure that this important community resource remained available. We put in significant operational time keeping it running - it was not a zero-maintenance server.
When the time came to update godoc.org to support Go modules, it was clear that a lot would need to change - the old godoc code just didn't expect any of the concepts that modules added. So we wrote a new one instead of trying to evolve the old one in place, and when it was ready, we turned down the old one with appropriate redirects to keep links working.
The idea that we "bought" godoc.org "just to cancel and replace" it is incredibly incendiary and not even remotely close to true. I'm stunned to see you spreading misinformation like this.
As for licenses, Google has deep pockets and does not want to be sued for non-permitted use of other people's source code. Our lawyers have decided that displaying a derived work (the docs) on a commercial site (anything Google runs) is something we need an clear license for. It is not hard to make a clear statement that code is licensed to allow the specific uses that are otherwise reserved to the author in copyright law. The 0BSD and MIT-0 licenses are good examples of clear statements granting the necessary rights, with no actual restrictions on use. WTFPL is very much not that kind of clear statement: it does not explicitly grant the copyright-reserved rights. Google's lawyers do not have any interest in one day having to stand up in court and defend having made commercial use of some software by debating the exact legal meaning of 'what the fuck you want to'.
It also turns out to be fairly difficult, legally, to put something in the public domain. If just saying "I put this in the public domain" were enough, the CC0 license would not be so incredibly long [1]. pkg.go.dev does recognize and display CC0-licensed code.
Yes, godoc.org used to display docs for code using any license at all. That was almost certainly a mistake, one that went unnoticed during the transfer of godoc.org to Google. I'm glad that the copyright violations on that site never led to any legal action.
[1] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.