In the case of the MIT license, I don&#x27;t see much harm in throwing in a CLA because it&#x27;s nearly impossible for Microsoft to do anything to break the terms of the license; however, while I am not a lawyer and this isn&#x27;t legal advice, in general signing a CLA (including in this instance) often gives the other party rights to re-license the work and continue to use the work if they end up in violation of the original license. For istance, a hugely popular, third-party Minecraft modification platform called Bukkit was partially licensed under the GPL (v2, I believe); however, it turned out that this code was not permitted to be distributed as GPL because it linked to to proprietary code, and Mojang was not eager to open source anything anytime soon. Because contributors submitted their contributions to be used under the terms of the GPL, and the project failed to meet the requirements of the GPL, contributors were then able to file legal DMCA notices of copyright infringement to take down the project.<p>Regardless of what license the project is filed under, as an individual contributor working for free for the community, the license of a project determines the terms under which I am sharing my work. I expect those to be respected in perpetuity, and I would like the right to rescind my contribution if the copyright holder is in violation of the license.<p>(Please don&#x27;t turn this into a GPL vs MIT discussion)<p>EDIT<p>Echoing other responders here, if you downvoted I would really appreciate the discussion of why.