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.
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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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They don't want people to make browsers using proprietary Google services. Most major browser projects also don't want to use them. I don't think you can compare how they treat Edge with how they treat say, Arch Linux making a browser using what they see as their Chrome services.
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The only remaining point I think I want to add here is that Google gave the distros that support in the first place.
But this is trending very far away from my beliefs on CLAs.
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Well, you shifted the topic to this. I was just mentioning that cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i is an example of a CLA that I regular contribute under and I'd only consider it a problem if they were using something like GPL where they get to do stuff with my code I can't with their code.
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As long as they use permissive licensing, I'm fine with contributing under permissive licensing including letting them do whatever they want with the code. MIT license is my default for anything and I find it benefits me the most.
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I won't contribute to a project if they use restrictive licensing but expect me to let them use my code permissively. That is why I brought up the example of a CLA that I am fine with for a permissively licensed project. I wouldn't contribute to a Google project that was GPL.
I'll happily contribute to a GPL project, but I expect them to use my code as GPL if they expect me to use their code that way. That's just how I see things. Their CLA is not that much different from just giving them Apache 2 licensed code. Their attributions are generic anyway.
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It would be a bit unfair if they preferred say, MIT licensing, but expected people to give them a patent grant via the CLA. They generally prefer Apache 2 though, so that seems fair enough. The CLA is largely just explicitly stating what giving them Apache 2 code already does.
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