[joecot]

If you want to convince people to get invested in using PenPot, while you've also taken VC funding, then yes that is the way to go about it. The main way that open source projects continue if a company suddenly pulls out is if there is a robust volunteer community to be able to fork and continue. If you build that community, that would be able to continue maintenance and development if, say, your VC funders decided today it would be better to take the ball and sell it to Adobe for 8 billion dollars, then you will have built the contingency for when you inevitably lose control.

[__d]

Is there a path for the community to develop an ownership position in the managing entity, in addition to having access to the source code?

[TuringTest]

There are projects which have managed to do so, like KDE's QT, which was closed source but negotiated an escrow license with the community to release the code as BSD if the owner company ever stopped development.

https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/