> you've pretty much given up your rights to you contribution
That's not true. With most CLAs, you retain all rights to your submission. You just give the maintainer a very generous license. I haven't seen a CLA that requires you to give up any rights to your own contribution.
If the maintainer decides to switch to a closed source license, you are free to fork and maintain an open source version with your changes.
This is the difference to copyright assignment. If you produce something as contractor or employee, usually whoever pays for your work owns it, and you can't go and publish your work under an open source license.
That's not true. With most CLAs, you retain all rights to your submission. You just give the maintainer a very generous license. I haven't seen a CLA that requires you to give up any rights to your own contribution.
If the maintainer decides to switch to a closed source license, you are free to fork and maintain an open source version with your changes.
This is the difference to copyright assignment. If you produce something as contractor or employee, usually whoever pays for your work owns it, and you can't go and publish your work under an open source license.