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As an author of a project I chose to license under the GPL, I now require a CLA in case I want to relicense my project under something more permissive, e.g. MIT (which would be prevented by other people submitting their pieces of code under the GPL).

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This is the exact reason I am against CLAs. Relicensing. You give me your work under the conditions of the GPL, then I as a contributor want to do the same. If relicensing is allowed you could just close up your source code and even though I contributed GPL code I could do nithing against it.

They can also be used in the other direction, allowing a corporation with an initially open-source license to re-license all contributed work, including closing it off.

It's my understanding that relicensing only applies to future releases, so the original contributed work would still be available under the original open-source license, and the project could be forked from that point.

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