Thank you, I appreciate your followup and edit. Copyright assignment agreements are worse than CLAs, but I'm not claiming that the Google CLA includes a copyright assignment.
It matters less for something like the Apache license than it does for a copyleft license, but there are still reasons people use Apache rather than MIT or public domain, and it does include several protections people care about.
Re your edit:
> AFAIK, the main purpose of the Google Individual CLA is to have you sign a statement claiming that you own the rights to your own work and didn't give up those rights to your employer.
The Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO, what you're signing if you use a "Signed-off-by: Your Name <email@example.org>" line) serves this same purpose, isn't a CLA, and doesn't cause any of the same problems. Legal departments generally don't have concerns with developers signing a DCO, while many will rightfully prevent or restrict signing a CLA (even when they were otherwise fine with a developer contributing to Open Source in general).
It matters less for something like the Apache license than it does for a copyleft license, but there are still reasons people use Apache rather than MIT or public domain, and it does include several protections people care about.
Re your edit:
> AFAIK, the main purpose of the Google Individual CLA is to have you sign a statement claiming that you own the rights to your own work and didn't give up those rights to your employer.
The Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO, what you're signing if you use a "Signed-off-by: Your Name <email@example.org>" line) serves this same purpose, isn't a CLA, and doesn't cause any of the same problems. Legal departments generally don't have concerns with developers signing a DCO, while many will rightfully prevent or restrict signing a CLA (even when they were otherwise fine with a developer contributing to Open Source in general).