Can't say I would want to depend on being able to hire one of the few devs from the core team as my contingency plan in a high risk situation. Precisely because they are fat and have a lot of money to throw around - that leaves room for inefficiency and getting squeezed by Oracle and the likes in exchange for covering their ass.

Didn't the same problem happen to the CloudFlare with LuaJIT where they would like to hire guys that worked on it but couldn't ?