I view Cardano as a little bit like a startup, with the ADA taking the place of stock for funding. When I look at past 2nd gen or 3rd gen traditional tech startups who have features that the large established players want... Think about Facebook’s strategy of defensively acquiring potentially competing technologies. I wonder if, or how a competing technology could shut Cardano down by purchasing the rights to the code.
Is this or any other acquisition model possible?
All development and code is open source for Cardano. This mean yes, it could happen and it has. Polkadot's consensus algorithm is based on Cardano's consensus algorithm called Ouroboros.