That is dangerious. While unlikely there are a few possible attachs. If the law changes such that the license is invalid you need to change to an up dated versian. if you allow them to change the license for that case they can change the license to anything. Consult with a lawyer to see if there is legal language that allows them to change the license as needed only so long as it meets the intent... note that intent is tricky. GPL 2 and 3 do not have the same intent according to Linus Torvalds but Richard Stallmen will say they do. good luck getting you contract to allow license changes if the intent is the same and having it really be your intent.
the above all seems unlikely but you cannot discount it. which is another reason to not sign a CLA - you have no idea what future changes you might agree with.
Can you please share why it is dangerous? If I release some code that I wrote myself, I own this code so I can always re release it in another strongly copy left license if there is a defect in AGPL v3 or whatever.
If you sign a CLA you no longer own that code. Thus you trust who ever now owns the code to make decisions you agree with but have no way to assure that.
depending on the terms you may own the code but it isn't a useful right as without everyone else including them you can't use your right to get a good license in place (one they disagree with so of course they won't)
> You hereby grant to Decathlon and to recipients of software distributed by Decathlon a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contributions and such derivative works.
Observe you are licensing the code, not transferring copyright.
I see you've repeated this in a few comments. Do you have a link?
By the way, I'm not disagreeing. I'm Australian and curious about the US situation. My understanding was that whilst you can't assign copyright — insofar as you ought to always be able refer to yourself as the original author — you can provide an irrevocable license giving someone else the rights to reproduce, license and sublicense as they see fit.
The person you're responding to is wrong. CLAs are not transfers of copyright ownership or code ownership. They're only licenses (that's the "L" in "CLA") that grant the recipient a set of rights for how they are allowed to use your code that you retain ownership over.
... GPLv3, or any later version with a similar spirit published by the Free Software Foundation or its successor.
Remember that without a license most people don't have any right to copy the software at all, so it's in a corporation's best interest to make sure the GPL continues to be valid. And the law always does what's in a corporation's best interest.
What is the spirit - is gpl 2 and 3 the same spirit? Some will argue no.
Right now gpl assumes things fall back to copyright but companies have an interest inencoding open soure into law in a way that would benefit them. Some trickery could make something in gpl illegal and then by law it falls back to the new open source license not no license.
the above all seems unlikely but you cannot discount it. which is another reason to not sign a CLA - you have no idea what future changes you might agree with.