I think the OpenOffice example shows that its difficult in practice for even
the most ill-intentioned company to abuse the users of a free application.
Contributions to OpenOffice.org (which was distributed under the GNU LGPLv3)
have ended up in the proprietary IBM Lotus Symphony suite for years. Because
of the copyright assignment. The ability to fork free software (I assume you
are referring to it) is a different topic. CLAs cannot do anything against
them: the ability to fork is consequence of the free software definition.
I do not quite understand the Koha case. But it does not look like it has
much to do with CLAs either. As far as I understand:
The competitor that bought the company would have bought the CLAs (and the
trademark, yet another topic) as well if there were such "agreements";
The code is not distributed anymore: it is SaSS. Choosing the AGPL would have
been the counter-measure. This has nothing to do with CLAs.
Nobody forked the original code (right before the company was bought)
although it was, and still is, possible. Libraries (i.e., tax dollars) should
pay developers to continue Koha. It would probably be cheaper than what they
had to pay before the fork anyway.
