My opinion: There is no good reason for you (a contributor) to sign a CLA for an open source project.
The only real reason that CLA is there is so that the entity behind it can change the license without your permission.
They should have to get your permission.
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Google requires this (without copyright assignment) for most of their projects but they use permissive licensing for nearly everything and that's the licensing I prefer for my own projects anyway. I just view their CLA as silly bureaucracy and don't mind contributing under it.
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I think it is worth noting that Google does this with Chromium so that they can make the proprietary Chrome without any concern about relicensing.
The way they've been trending, I think it's very likely that they'll close all the source they can at some point.
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I think you're wrong about that and from my perspective Chromium dropping support for proprietary services would be major progress. It's used by a bunch of downstream browsers, not just Chrome, and it would be better off as a much more vendor neutral project closer to LLVM.
I don't really care if their client code for proprietary services is open source or not, as long as it's not in Chromium. It doesn't belong there. Chromium is the upstream for Edge, Brave and a bunch of other browsers too. Most of them don't want those Google services included.
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There's a big difference between supporting an open standard hosted by Google by default or potentially others vs. including a hard-wired proprietary service without a stable, documented API in the upstream for most browsers where most of them don't want to include those things.
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Except it's never been run that way, and the upstream treats any use of the chromium source by anyone that isn't Google with extreme derision.
The moment that any of those chromium based browsers begin to seriously compete, I think Google decides they've had enough with open.
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They really don't treat it that way. Rather, they treat Linux distributions making Chrome-like builds of Chromium using their proprietary services that way. They happily work with Microsoft and others upstream including giving them commit access and optionally Chromium emails.
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