Bad advice.
You should be wary always. CLA or not, nothing guarantees that the project you depend on will receive updates, not even if you pay for them and the project is 100% closed source.
What you’re suggesting is perpetuating the myth that open source means updates available forever for free. This is not and never has been the case.
Re:MinIO repository is no longer maintained
by j1elo on Friday February 13, 2026 @01:18PM
(#47005848)
Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea.
What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice.
Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.
Re:MinIO repository is no longer maintained
by everfrustrated on Friday February 13, 2026 @03:41PM
(#47007558)
You are correct. Signing a CLA is in effect saying you approve this project doing a rug-pull and becoming closed-source in the future.
Having a FOSS license is NOT enough. Idealy the copyright should be distributed across all contributors. That's the only way to make overall consensus a required step before relicensing (except for reimplementation).
Pick FOSS projects without CLAs that perform Copyright Assignment to an untrusted entity (few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past)