No, it is not accurate. That is not what Google's CLA says. (Though there are other CLAs out there that are closer to what you describe)
(*Update:* Though IANAL, you should read the child comment and the CLA itself and make up your own mind. https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual. The rest of my comment is mostly independent of the previous paragraph).
OTOH, IANAL, but AFAIK anyone can fork `jj` and sell a proprietary product based on jj (and distribute it under pretty much whatever license they like, with very few restrictions) because it is currently Apache licensed, but that is unrelated to the Google CLA.
Let me conjecture even more wildly about things I don't know. The following is a guess on my part.
One way to interpret this is that Google tends to publish their projects under Apache, and there is no need to demand that people transfer copyright to Google. By releasing your work under Apache, you are already giving Google (or anyone else) all the rights it needs.
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.
> Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Google and to recipients of software distributed by Google a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
That is a substantially more permissive license than Apache-2.0 (let alone other licenses, which apply to works to which Google also applies that CLA). That term means that Google can ignore the terms of Apache-2.0 and instead use the work under this much more permissive license, while everyone else is bound by Apache-2.0. In other words, they can do whatever they want with the code. Others could ship it in a proprietary product, sure, but they can't ignore the terms of the license while doing so.
"Permissive license" doesn't mean "do whatever you want". Apache-2.0, among other things, requires maintaining license notices,
(Note that the "and to recipients of" clause doesn't imply others can ignore the license terms, because they'd still be subject to the terms of whatever license Google puts on the software they distribute, whether that's Apache-2.0 or some proprietary license.)
So I maintain that "there's a single company with the right to change the licensing arbitrarily" is a largely accurate summary/gloss. Or, if you prefer, "there's a single company with the right to ignore the license terms".
This is a good point, you can indeed argue that "there's a single company with the right to ignore the license terms" is correct. Thank you for elaborating, I added a note to my comment.
I'm still not sure whether it really matters in light of the Apache license, but I don't feel qualified to argue about that.
I guess the straw-man I was arguing against was that some people think you transfer your copyright to Google (you don't), but that's different from what you claimed.
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).
