I don't see this as a negative thing at all. Quite the opposite, it's a very positive development. A lot of the most popular open source projects have or had at some point the backing of one or more companies. Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, Linux, Wine, VirtualBox, Blender, Open Office, etc. Open source is great but the bad thing about it is that somehow people completely lost respect for the job of "software developer". It seems like they don't feel software developers are entitled to receive money for working which is absurd. Gavin now having a commercial interest in Bitcoin means he is much less likely to stop developing Bitcoin at some point due to a loss of interest and it also means he can spend more time on it. And it's in TruCoin's best interest to help Bitcoin succeed. There is of course a risk but the way Bitcoin works makes this risk rather minimal. If some or all of the developers of the Bitcoin client at some point decide to do something that the majority (51%) of the community doesn't like, people will just use a fork or a different client and the current developers would loose control over Bitcoin which solves the problem.