Any company requiring external contributors to assign their copyright to them, or full relicensing rights, is effectively using the free software ecosystem as unpaid labor. It's just as bad as the music industry exploiting artists to get them to sell off their rights.
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As you may know, the FSF is one such "company", requiring copyright assignment for many of their own projects. Funny, isn't it?
But it goes further than that.
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Don't forget they *also* have successfully convinced the majority of the GPL ecosystem to use "or any later version" wording, which gives them perpetual relicensing rights over the *vast majority of GPLed code in existence*.
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You think Google's CLA is bad? The FSF have convinced everyone to effectively CLA their code to the FSF and convinced them that this is a *good thing* and it's fine because they can be trusted.
They are not trustworthy.
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Google's CLA doesn't require copyright assignment. It gives them a permissive license for your code and an explicit patent grant. They give you the same thing by releasing their projects under the Apache 2 license.
The terms would be unfair if they released their code as GPL.
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Why do they need the CLA if the license already gives them the same thing? You don't need a CLA in order to get rights for a contribution licensed under a given license.
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Have you looked at cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i?
Compare it to apache.org/licenses/LICEN, which even has a section on contributions. It's nearly the same.
They require a CLA because they want you to explicitly agree to those kinds of terms and have it on record that you agreed to it.
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Only substantial difference I see is they don't need to distribute a copy of the license you gave them through the CLA. In practice, they release nearly everything as Apache 2 with generic attribution like "The Go Authors".
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Seems like a bad value proposition then; many developers are turned off by having to go through CLA bureaucracy, while it doesn't really buy them anything. They should just use sign-offs like Linux does.
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It's not really annoying bureaucracy because all you have to do is agree to it online via your Google account. I'm sure it discourages some people from contributing because they wrongly assume it requires copyright assignment.
They basically want an explicit Apache 2 license.
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I don't think Google would require the explicit agreement if their lawyers didn't consider it important.
The Linux kernel has their own ideas about how copyright and the GPL work. It's not clear how much of it aligns with what a court would decide. Law doesn't work like code.
I do think their CLA would be incredibly unfair if they used copyleft licensing themselves. In some cases, that does happen, such as their forks of the Linux kernel. It's not really intentional that they don't give you the same permissive licensing in return in that case though.
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Their CLA even includes the explicit statement that you aren't giving them a warranty or ongoing support. The patent grant is conditional on not having a lawsuit filed against you over usage of the project. It's really almost entirely the same thing as the Apache 2 license.
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