What adding one clause to MIT costs you downstream
Write a licence for software that moves money, so users acknowledge market risk rather than inferring a promise.
The Digital Asset / Payment Protocol License is the MIT text plus a condition: the user accepts the software involves market risk, including possible loss of principal, with no guarantee investment objectives will be achieved. The intent is reasonable.
The problem is mechanical rather than legal. Adding a clause to MIT does not
produce MIT with a note, it produces a new licence, and licences are consumed by
machines. There is no SPDX identifier for it, so license-checker, FOSSA,
GitHub’s own detection and Debian’s tooling all classify it as unknown. Anything
gating on an approved-licence list rejects it, and corporate legal escalates it,
because their process is a list lookup and this is not on the list.
Compatibility with GPL and Apache-2.0 also has to be reasoned from scratch, by a
lawyer who bills for the hour.
So the cost is real and the benefit is near zero, because MIT’s all-caps warranty section already disclaims this and the added clause restates it in more specific words.
The version that gets the same outcome is keeping MIT unmodified and putting the
risk language in the README and a DISCLAIMER.md.