My employer requires that all open source projects have a CLA, but there's really no benefit ever to be gained from closing any of its projects. My understandi

My employer requires that all open source projects have a CLA, but there's really no benefit ever to be gained from closing any of its projects. My understanding is that the CLA is there for two main reasons: First, as a legal CYA, since large companies are lawsuit magnets, and more importantly to me: for flexibility in changing the OSS license we use. Our individual OSS projects have moved between teams, and best practices enough that we have them under a number of permissive licenses (BSD-3-clause, MIT, Apache 2.0). It's been useful sometimes when combining projects, or to reduce the number of license headers to (sparingly) re-license under a common license. Without a CLA this would basically be impossible. The CLA does require trust that we won't relicense under a restrictive license or gain undeserved benefit by making commercial licenses that rely on the copyright (as opposed to say I support license). That has turned some potential contributors off. At least that's a choice everyone can make.