Downsides of Contributor License Agreements (CLAs)
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Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) impede modest contributions
However, as far as I know (and I did look), my university has no blanket policy on employees signing individual CLAs to contribute work they did on university time. Obtaining permission from the university would likely take multiple people each spending some time on this. Many of them are busy people, and beyond that you might as well think of this as a meeting where all of us are sitting around a table for perhaps half an hour, and we all know how much meetings cost once you multiply the cost of each person's time out. Universities may feel that staff time is often almost free, but that isn't universal and there are limits.
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CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions
I've seen a view expressed that Contributor License Agreements are only a small extra piece of formality over contributing bugfixes and other open source changes. I think this is wrong. Often, the decisions that are made over whether or not to contribute changes to open source projects are significantly different than the decisions that must be made over CLAs, such that my university and similar institutions have little to lose from the former and a great deal to lose from the latter.