While it's always unfortunate when a company in charge of a particular open source product is unable to establish a working business model, I don't see anything wrong with copyright assignment even when this "worst-case" scenario plays out.
You still get to keep the project's code at the point of your submission as open source, and are free to keep developing it in a fork. There is no lack of symmetry in the contributions: you get their code (usually much more than what your submission is), and they get yours.
In general, it's pretty similar to contributing to non-copyleft projects: someone can take them and release them with non-free improvements. In this case, at least the company doing that has contributed majority of the code in the first place.
So I feel the same contributing to a MIT/BSD/... licensed project as I feel about assigning copyright on a copyleft project.
I do agree with the ideal that one should strive to only contribute to projects that are planning on staying free software (and thus require no copyright assignment), but there is nothing dishonest about copyright assignment.
Even with best intentioned free software maintainers, they might simply stop developing their project: the result is pretty much the same.
You still get to keep the project's code at the point of your submission as open source, and are free to keep developing it in a fork. There is no lack of symmetry in the contributions: you get their code (usually much more than what your submission is), and they get yours.
In general, it's pretty similar to contributing to non-copyleft projects: someone can take them and release them with non-free improvements. In this case, at least the company doing that has contributed majority of the code in the first place.
So I feel the same contributing to a MIT/BSD/... licensed project as I feel about assigning copyright on a copyleft project.
I do agree with the ideal that one should strive to only contribute to projects that are planning on staying free software (and thus require no copyright assignment), but there is nothing dishonest about copyright assignment.
Even with best intentioned free software maintainers, they might simply stop developing their project: the result is pretty much the same.