The CLA has you granting them a non-open-source license. It permits them to change the Zed license to a proprietary one while still incorporating your contributions. It doesn't assign copyright ownership, but your retaining the ability to release your contribution under a different license later has little practical value.

Isn't that a good thing? As a dev submitting something to them, I want my feature/bugfix to stay with the product.

Are you suggesting that devs should be able to burden the original contribution with conditions, like "they can't use my code without permission 5 years later if you relicense"? That's untenable, isn't it?

I don't know how else you would accept external contributions for software without the grant in the CLA. Perhaps I'm not creative enough!

I submit my code contributions, for free, because I am participating in a collaborative community effort called an Open Source Project. I do not typically contribute to the proprietary codebases of for-profit companies for free; I have a contractor rate for that.

If you say 'that makes it untenable for me to accept your contributions for free, then relicense to proprietary keeping those contributions', well, that's your problem. I don't particularly care about arranging tenable circumstances for you to sell my work under a proprietary license without paying me.

The way you accept external contributions for software without a CLA grant is by not attempting to take the project proprietary, and keeping the open source arrangement forever. I do not see how you could be confused about an open source project staying open source forever while taking open-source-only contributions. That is what almost all open source projects do.

That's a really good point—I hadn't considered it from that angle. Thanks for that perspective.

I'm concerned about relicensing. See HashiCorp.