As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money.
It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO.
> If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money
This is idle speculation, and I personally don't think that's true.
> Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money.
I don't know who you mean by "They" but neither the creators of the DAO, nor the Ethereum foundation has kept any money that was lost in this unfortunate incident. If you're going to accuse people of things please provide citations with evidence.
[1] https://medium.com/curator-multisig-phf-official-channel/dao...
The Foundation itself may not have been invested, but many of the members and core contributors were (Gavin Wood, core contributor of the Rust implementation, was rumored to have over $100k in DAO tokens).
> neither the creators of the DAO, nor the Ethereum foundation has kept any money that was lost in this unfortunate incident.
The hard fork, by definition, allowed everyone to keep what would have been lost.
And it wasn't an "unfortunate incident", it was a publicly stated inevitability, advertised not only by the platform (with the words "unstoppable code" on the home page) but by the authors of the DAO themselves ("Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered for educational purposes and do not supercede or modify the express terms of The DAO’s code set forth on the blockchain;").
I didn't agree with the fork, and I choose to follow the majority of miners anyway because I still believe in Ethereum, but quit trying to rewrite history.
The hard fork had a lot more to do with the fact the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor. There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners, there was consensus to do the fork and so the fork happened.
The author of Casper, Vlad Zamfir, clearly stated on numerous occasions on Reddit that there was no risk to PoS b/c of the hack.
> There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners
That's a really nice way of phrasing "we have a moral right to help gamblers recoup their losses."
That's a bit cynical to call the token holder gamblers, sure many of them "invested" thinking they would get some return back, but a lot of people were genuily curious in participating in this decentralized democracy experiment that never came to be. Regardless even if these people were 'gamblers' stealing is still stealing and returning stolen money is the right thing to do.
This was a lot less decentralized than the PR indicated.
That's incorrect, He was previously in the Ethereum Foundation but left (due to disagreements with Vitalik) long before the DAO was created.