Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

I find it very annoying how copyright assignments and contributor agreements (which is a general term, and can have any number of things in it) are confused. Apache has a contributor agreement, which essentially says that a contributor licenses the Apache Foundation the right to their code (duh), holds you up in the matter that you're allowed to do that, and that if you have any patents related to this, you're allowing their free use for the matter of this project (I'm vastly abbreviating here, read the real thing for the proper details).

But most importantly, you keep all of your copyrights, no assignments. Yet, it seems to me to be a much more useful agreement, for the patent bits, for example. A project that finds itself copyright owner of a piece of code that is covered by a patent doesn't really have much of use, doesn't it?