I'm not very happy about requiring contributors of these OSS projects to sign any CLA, and have read articles such as [2] about how they can be harmful to OSS, but I've read specifically bad things about the Harmony ones [3]. This choice was consulted to and approved by a lawyer firm, but I worry that they were analyzing from the point of view of the business interests of members without much regards to how beneficial or harmful it might result for the OSS side of the projects. Specifically, I'd like to avoid a bad impact on the number of OSS contributions the projects receive.

I'm told the ground principle behind adding these CLAs is protecting both contributors and projects, preserving from contributions that might break each of the current project licenses and their business commercialization possibilities.

Is there a better option that can be proposed instead? (I'm in the position of making such proposal). I read about DCOs ([4], [5]), but those seem to be meant for a much smaller set of requirements.

[1]: http://harmonyagreements.org/agreements.html

[2]: https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems

[3]: http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origin

[5]: https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-difference