Nobody is arguing that a world without CLAs isn’t a more convenient world with a lower barrier to entry. It most obviously is that. But there are a couple of flaws in your argument.
The first is that Red Hat requires CLAs all over the place. Fedora has one, Jboss has one. The real major project that doesn’t have CLAs? Linux. The project that had massive lawsuits and doubt about the origin and dispensation of the code? Linux. CLAs exist to protect consumers of the software from those kinds of shenanigans. A world *without* those shenanigans is highly preferential, for the record – and if we lived in it, then open source products wouldn’t need CLAs.
But if you are working on a project of sufficient size, or that is backed by multiple large corporate entities whose intent is to have a commercial presence in the market in addition to it’s open source nature, having CLAs is a requirement of the intellectually honest.
Now, not all CLAs are created equal. I personally think that copyright assignment CLAs are pretty heinous, with the exception being those that go directly to non-profit foundations with strong charters (GNU). The mess we’re in with MySQL is a direct result of contributors signing copyright to the corporate entity. So it’s not all roses in CLA land.
The burden is real. The core issue is that the legal burden exists at all – that we need to have this sort of clarification around contribution. But until we reform the patent and copyright systems, for projects whose aim is widespread adoption and collaboration, CLAs set the rules that ensure that won’t be any shenanigans.
