Fediverse

It absolutely does matter who the founder and sponsors are, they help determine the direction of the project and how intellectual property regarding it is treated. They're also a bit more likely to be the major flagship service, at least in a critical early stage, which also gives them power and influence over the technology. Technology is not separated from our social world in an ideal.

Consider lemmy, pleroma and mastodon. Their founders have influenced large parts of their respective services, not all of them, but the largest parts of them. In some cases, this has even influenced the code itself (two of these had applied-by-default slur filters at a stage).

this proposal is not evil

Why would it be? 'Evil' is a strange concept, and many destructive and horrible ideas weren't even motivated by things like greed or malicious intent.