SPJ is a Microsoft Research Cambridge employee, but as far as I know that doesn't give Microsoft Research (let alone Microsoft itself) any undue influence over the language's direction, they can't gatekeep or ram things into Haskell or GHC.
It would still be corporate sponsorship and not a true community effort though. Not having to work to pay bills makes it much easier to run a large project.
Pretty sure SPJ does have to work to pay bills. It's just that they work for a research institution and can thus do part of their work in / on the project. In no small part because CS research was one of the use cases for creating Haskell.
