To be fair, the KDE team knew that they were dealing with a corporate entity that would want to retain some sort of control over how software it creates and distributes is licensed.
Signing a CLA is nothing new, in fact the FSF do exactly the same thing so they can shunt their projects to the next GPL without having to contact developers.
If developers have an issue with such an arrangement, then they shouldn't be contributing to those companies and organisations in the first place.
Note the point about starting to apply a CLA after the fact to an existing project. KDE certainly consciously took a risk when deciding to try and collaborate with a corporate entity, but that doesn't mean the community can't be disappointed at the outcome. Nobody is complaining about a CLA they knew of in advance - because they did not.
And personally I don't think a CLA makes sense for the specific code in question, which is purposefully designed as an interoperability solution and so implicitly multi-stakeholder.
