@eri @shroomie More accurately, a CLA is an agreement where you surrender your copyrights to another party under contract terms that are in detriment to you in exchange for certain liability for you.

CLA's are usually utilized to ensure that volunteers are able to improve source-available, proprietary software without even getting paid, while ensuring the software stays proprietary.

Less often, they're used by businesses to maintain proprietary and free versions (usually with less features) of software in parallel, although it's somewhat often that the business decides to make everything 100% proprietary for a future version on a whim.

CLA's can't be used to steal code (after all, actual free versions of software (i.e. with source code included) always remain free) - rather they can be used to steal freedom.