El tema de las CLAs (Contributor License Agreement) está en boca de todos estos días debido a que es uno de las mayores pegas que se esgrimen a la adopción de upstart como sistema de inicio de Debian. Los defensores de upstart argumentan que no solo Canonical sino otras organizaciones usan CLAs, incluyendo la FSF.

Matthew Garrett ha escrito una entrada titulada Not all CLAs are equal, analizando el uso que hacen de las CLAs diferentes proyectos de software libre y empresas:

In contrast, Canonical ship software under the GPLv3 family of licenses (GPL, AGPL and LGPL) but require that contributors sign an agreement that permits Canonical to relicense their contributions under a proprietary license. This is a fundamentally different situation to almost all widely accepted CLAs, and it's disingenuous for Canonical to defend their CLA by pointing out the broad community uptake of, for instance, the Apache CLA.

(También las puntualizaciones respecto a la situación de Qt en los comentarios son relevantes)

En cambio, Linus Torvalds parece que está en total desacuerdo:

“To be fair, people just like hating on Canonical. The FSF and Apache Foundation CLA’s are pretty much equally broken. And they may not be broken because of any relicencing, but because the copyright assignment paperwork ends up basically killing the community. Basically, with a CLA, you don’t get the kind of “long tail” that the kernel has of random drive-by patches. And since that’s how lots of people try the waters, any CLA at all – changing the license or not – is fundamentally broken.”

:wq