Comment by jkaplowitz

The seller that would be necessary is a legal non-profit foundation in the Netherlands, and currently for at least some important assets like the Godot trademark in the US, also a long-standing US 501(c)(3) public charity focused broadly on free software which is not controlled by the Godot team. These non-profits would usually not be legally allowed to subvert the purpose of the organization / the project in this way, based on their approved non-profit mission, and the relevant non-profit regulators could slap them down in court if they do.

Additionally the copyright isn’t even owned by those organizations but rather retained in full by all of the many individual contributors to Godot, without a Contributor License Agreement.

So any for-profit corporate acquirer would not be able to get the Godot name, and if they didn’t want to have to comply with the Godot copyright license, they’d have to get the agreement of every individual contributor whose work they don’t want to rewrite.

In short, they are safe from acquisition in the same way that Debian is, unlike most corporate-sponsored or small-team personally-owned “open source” projects that we see here on Hacker News.