I agree. With a lot of public interest now directed at our project, I'd like to avoid falling into any legal disputes with developers who are neither familiar with or aware of our openness.

Would you recommend using the same CLA that the phabricator team has implemented? They've said that theirs is very similar to the one used by the Apache foundation.

From the info I sourced on the different pages, some creative commons, share alike? license is to be used for documentation. GPLv3 for software, and cern open hardware license for the metal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

Other than re-licensing to something else, i don't see the "benefit" to be had. Is there an actual problem with the licenses?

All things left to how they are now, it shouldnt be a problem, since the licenses are the same to all parties. The question arises in whether the project seeks to re-license at a later stage.

CLAs are cumbersome, and stifle growth, it is an oft quoted reason for why canonical projects aren't seeing more popularity with outside developers.

I agree with Allan here, we should not try to solve a problem that isn't one for us currently.

This would mean major bureaucratic hurdles and could scare away the few external contributors we have gathered so far just to prepared for a hypothetical what-if scenario that's not likely to happen (did it ever happen in open source history?).

I'm more than happy to agree to not do it, and if we don't have any other feedback going in te opposite direction, we can won't fix in a week or so