Opinions differ on CLAs. There are certainly arguments for them as laid out in that article.
There are also arguments against them in many cases, including that they create friction for new contributors. "Oh, I have to sign this agreement which means talking to my company's legal staff? I think I'll just pass."
The parent is also probably right that GPL with no CLA makes it much harder to change a project's license. This actually came up when GPL v3 was released. As it turned out, Linux apparently didn't want to change Linux from a v2 to a v3 license. But there were also legal questions about whether he could do so by himself even had he wanted to. (Though Eben Moglen argued at the time that he maybe possibly could have for various arcane reasons.)
Your podcast is very good! I recommended the series to a friend who manages an open source project. Looking forward to your other interviews.
In the podcast episode, the guest does mention people are moving away from CLAs. He goes on to say projects are adopting a “Developer Certificate of Origin” model. I found an article that helped me start to understand differences in these models: “CLA vs. DCO: What's the difference?”, https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-differe....
Thank you for the citation. I’ve added that episode (and the rest) to my listening queue & look forward to your other episodes too. Looks like a cool podcast!
There are also arguments against them in many cases, including that they create friction for new contributors. "Oh, I have to sign this agreement which means talking to my company's legal staff? I think I'll just pass."
The parent is also probably right that GPL with no CLA makes it much harder to change a project's license. This actually came up when GPL v3 was released. As it turned out, Linux apparently didn't want to change Linux from a v2 to a v3 license. But there were also legal questions about whether he could do so by himself even had he wanted to. (Though Eben Moglen argued at the time that he maybe possibly could have for various arcane reasons.)
ADDED: I recorded a podcast on this and related issues recently: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-governance-chris-...