I think people's stated positions on CLAs are often not clearly thought out. Mostly when I've seen people object to CLAs, it's on the grounds that it's not acc

I think people's stated positions on CLAs are often not clearly thought out. Mostly when I've seen people object to CLAs, it's on the grounds that it's not acceptable for any company to be able to take freely contributed code and fork it into a proprietary licenced version or change of open source license, yet... the same people encourage contributions to permissively licensed projects, such as MIT/BSD/Apache license, which explicitly grant companies the ability to do those same things! Some CLAs are almost identical to the effect of contributions being under a permissive license like MIT/BSD/Apache. So when I've seen blanket CLA objections, I usually have the impression the person hasn't really thought about what it means, and they're saying it as more of a cultural signifier than anything with a clear goal. I've encountered this while evaluating whether to release a project under the GPL, where I wanted the option to relicense it more permissively later (for everyone), and I wanted that to be clear up front with any contributors. For that, a CLA seems appropriate, but the community has evolved to find them objectionable.