The concern would generally be people see certain organisations as altruistic. GNU is generally well respected and the GNU Coreutils are ancient, people trust them highly.
But the more commercial you get, the more likely people are to say "They're only asking for a CLA so they can benefit from open source contributions and then sell them as proprietary in the future".
Not that it tends to happen like that in practise, but it's the concern people would have. The GPL is a very politically motivated license and in theory the CLA is a backdoor to destroy the whole point of it in favour of the CLA owner.
Naming names for the sake of example though, systemd was partially made because the author/community weren't keen on the CLA on upstart, the competitor at the time, coincidentally a Canonical project.
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