The _only_ reason to require a CLA is because you expect to change the license in the future. RustFS has rug-pull written all over it.

Or to offer it under a commercial licence in parallel.

While that is the most common use case for CLAs, it is normally done by contributors granting a very permissive, but not exclusive, license to a legal entity like a company or foundation, in addition to the public license granted to everyone.

This is not that. This is not even a license. They want a full transfer of intellectual property ownership. Sure that enables them to use it in a commercial product, but it also enables them to sue if contributors contribute similarly to other projects. Obviously that would create a shit storm, and there is an exception with the public license, but riddle me this: can you legally make similar contributions to multiple projects that have this type of CLA?

Let us take a step back and instead look where such terms are more common: employment contracts.

That doesn't require full copyright assignment, though, right?

How would you run a project like this? People come and go. People do a one-time contribution and then you never hear from them again. People work on a project for years and then just go silent. Honestly, credit where credit is due, but how is a project like this supposed to manage this?

You can have CLA without assigning copyright to the project.

You don't need assignment to the project if you are not planning to change project's license.

You do need assignment to the project if you need to ever rugpull the community and close the code

You could pick a license and not plan to relicense later. Like Linux.

What do you mean by 'manage?' In your mind, what are you planning to do in the future that you need my full copyright as a change owner?

Without a valid CLA and a strong core team, you often end up with fragmentation or legal deadlock. Even the ASF isn't a silver bullet—projects without strong leadership die there all the time. The CLA exists to prevent that friction.

Then it's not the CLA that ensures project survivability. It's the strong core team you mentioned.

MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...

That's so weird. Your contribution is a derived work based on AGPL, so it must be AGPL...

The number of weird incompetent things the Minio people have done is surprisingly high.