> It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights.

Sometimes that big party is a single developer, or just a small group. They invest several years into developing a working product, unpaid, and then give it away, with the condition that anybody who wants to use it in a proprietary product must pay up.

Not all CLAs require a developer to "give up their rights." The code authors can retain their copyright, but sign an irrevocable contract which allows for the distributor to re-license their work as they see fit. The original author too, is still able to license it as they see fit.

If, on the other hand, the developers only release their work as AGPL with no separate licensing, all they are doing is ensuring that a subset of companies who might otherwise use their software, definitely wont. There are many companies who simply can't AGPL their own works and if they can't use your software, they'll find an alternative, or develop and alternative in house.

I'm certainly against the idea of coercing companies to pay for licenses by instilling fear, but I think it's only a subset of dual licensing companies which do this. A dual licensing approach isn't inherently coercive. If they're clear about their licensing model up-front then it shouldn't be an issue.

Also consider that at any point, you can take one of these AGPL dual licensed products, fork it, and not sign over any CLA, then you can distribute a fully copy-left variant of it with some additions of your own. You would question why wouldn't everyone contribute to your version rather than the one where they hand over the copyright of their modifications. There's an obvious reason this rarely happens: The bulk of the work and maintenance is being done by the company collecting the license fees, and community contributions are just a small percent. There are cases where the community version gets enough development effort to be able to spin off a successful fork - eg, MariaDB.

Also, CLAs are yet another stumbling block for contributors. Many people that could easily contribute to a regular GPL/BSD project per company guidelines might be prevented from doing by the need to effectively sign a contract or might need to involve comapny legal department.

Remember the context here. Yes, commercially-owned AGPL projects that require CLAs are not especially easy to contribute to. FOSS projects can be more or less easy to contribute to for lots of reasons, and most of those reasons aren't "seedy". I'd argue that in most cases, the CLA case isn't "seedy" either: the commercial sponsor funds most of the work; the project isn't an elaborate scheme to get free dev cycles from the community, but rather trades access to code (and the potential for a hostile fork) for greater adoption. That seems like a trade that Kuhn should welcome.

But all this doesn't leave contributors without any rights: they can still decide to band together and fork the whole thing. Even after signing CLAs and having contributed to the original codebase for a while.