[hardwaresofton]

True, but who's going to sue you? Developers? More likely the EFF, but they can't go after everyone. Legal recourse is increasingly becoming only possible for the most motivated or well endowed participants.

Also CLAs are pretty common these days, the legalese is written in a very non-offensive manner, and the youngsters that are new to open source probably don't think twice about signing it (assuming you should think twice about signing it in the first place, of course, some people may not agree with that).

Free bootstrapped money-printer startup idea for someone -- software for managing CLAs (projects, signatures, revocation, etc) would probably be a no-brainer for most of the companies looking to get into OSS. Making this easier for companies may damage the ecosystem (essentially enabling more of the behavior I've outlined), but it could also be good because it brings sunlight, if you know the playbook (and it's obvious when someone asks you to sign a CLA), then the community as a whole can avoid those companies' projects, or know what they're buying into, and the shift between Free software, open source software, and source-available software will widen.