The active core committers over the last month, and their employers, in order of whether or not they're me:

- Isaac Z. Schlueter (npm author/admin, lead gatekeeper, stream maintainer, javascripter), Joyent

- Ben Noordhuis (issues list champion, most opinionated C++ developer, libuv unix guy), StrongLoop

- TJ Fontaine (build owner, C shim author, tracing afficianado, Master of Robots), Joyent

- Trevor Norris (performance perfectionist, master of dirty hacks), Mozilla

- Fedor Indutny (russian ninja rockstar, TLS tamer), Voxer

Also very important to the project are Bert Belder (Windows guy, libuv co-author) at StrongLoop, and Scott Blomquist (Windows bug-chaser, Microsoft liason) at Microsoft.

Honorable Mention to Ryan Dahl (Node.js creator, BDFL) who is currently off being a professional hipster somewhere in NYC, and not involved with the project. When he did work on Node, he was paid by Joyent, and he got some money for selling the copyright to the company as well.

The Node.js community experience would be much less pleasant if not for Nodejitsu's continued support of the public npm registry. (Nodejitsu acquired IrisCouch a few months ago.)

Node would continue on even if Joyent bit the dust. (Depending on who assumed ownership of the mark, it may or may not have to change name/logo.)

If you've had a bad experience in the past with Joyent, it probably has nothing to do with the experience you might have with Node.js. I am given free reign here to manage the project free of any overt Joyent influence. Joyent is a big Node user, and a lot of really smart people, so I do take it seriously if they have something to say. Especially considering that most of the time when Joyent engineers have a problem with Node, it's related to other users hosted on their platform (Walmart, Voxer, etc.)

Joyent has basically got it as far as they needed it to get for their own uses. Now they are just sitting on it and keeping it stable while letting userland modules cover future expansion.