The contributor owns the copyright. In Germany for example, there's no transfer of copyright, only non-exclusive license to use. The Developer Certificate of Origin can be used to be make it legal.
In other jurisdictions, and depending on employee contract it may default to your employer. Hence the posted article.
It is a sad side-effect that assigning away your rights with a CLA to some company also enables some shady behavior[0], but it seems that the possible intent to “to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter” co-exists with a more reasonable desire not to have parts of the codebase that you started and mostly maintain at your own cost owned by a potentially hostile entity.
That said, it’s sad that DCOs are not used instead[1]. IIUC, DCO basically makes it clear that the contributor is the one owning the copyright, eliminating the above issue without enabling the rug-pulling.
[0] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html
It‘s basically the same in Germany. Urheberrecht is not the same as copyright, but comprises personal rights and exploitation rights. 99% of questions about Urheberrecht in commercial settings are about exploitation rights, so ~ about copyright in an American sense.
Personal rights (mostly the right to be named) stay with the author and can never be transferred, exploitation rights default to the employer in employment situations (and are usually explicitly transferred in work contracts, to be safe).
A CLA does not affect who owns the code. It only grants the OSS project the right to use the code.
Generally speaking, a CLA will be a non-exclusive license, meaning you can give the OSS project the right to use your code while you also retain the ability to license that code to others as well (as well as continue to use it in your own projects)
> while you also retain the ability to license that code to others as well
Depends on the license! Always read what you sign. Get a lawyer to read it.