@fontana, while I think Red Hat's Fedora CLA is better than most, I still think it's problematic that its fallback is a highly lax, permissive license, rather than "license of the project". I still don't understand why Red Hat won't default to inbound=outbound for Fedora.
The 'default to MIT' idea was developed primarily by Tom Callaway. The policy for documentation is in effect inbound/outbound since CC BY-SA became the standard Fedora docs license at a certain point (replacing the horrific OPL).
I think it has to be understood in light of the historical circumstances that existed during 2008-2009: the fact that Fedora had begun using an Apache-style CLA a few years earlier, and the fact that Red Hat was, for a moment, contemplating broad use of an Apache-style CLA (until about mid-2008).
"License of the project" certainly makes sense for nearly all FLOSS projects. Certain aspects of what distros do might be a little different though. Fedora is a project but it has no true 'license' as such other than the sum total of all the licenses of the pieces of the distribution and other things associated with the project (such as infrastructure projects and wiki content). So there's no single "license of Fedora". There are some Fedora-specific projects where 'license of the project' would work and I would say for those projects the Fedora contributor agreement is of dubious value. The other scenario, and the main one originally contemplated for the Fedora CLA, was the somewhat absurd case of RPM spec files. It's not clear to me that spec files, to the extent copyrightable, should match the 'license of the project' being packaged (which is often not pin-down-able to a single license).
FWIW, I collected a lot of links to various anti-CLA materials in my anti-Harmony blog post: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html