I just dug into the details. Yes, it looks pretty legitimate: copyright remains held by the individual contributors without a Contributor License Agreement, they are sponsored by a true non-profit foundation with robust non-profit policies and suitably non-profit legal status in the Netherlands, their money and important assets like the Godot trademark itself are held by a mixture of that non-profit foundation and (possibly as a transitional matter) the longstanding free software non-profit charity in the US which was their primary legal home for 7 years.

I was formerly heavily involved in the leadership of the other major US non-profit charity that does this kind of fiscal sponsorship (and which maintained a friendly and collaborative relationship with the charity that Godot previously used). They’re not scamming you in the way of a lot of executives at VC-funded for-profit startups (and their acquirers) when they make entirely legally unenforceable statements about what will or won’t happen in the future which they don’t necessarily even believe themselves.

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.

I just can't see it happening - I wasn't meaning financial acquisition per se, it could be internally circulated fork a la closed-source Linux Kernel on embedded devices, and Chinese games developers/publishers seem - albeit just impression, to have better vertical integration and open minds toward pulling it, whereas Japanese companies have bad track records on shared codebases.