Why must a company be "behind" this change? 2 minutes of sleuthing seems to suggest that the author of the JEP is a freelance developer who contributes to OpenJDK independently.

Why does there need to be a company affiliation at all? Do you feel this JEP is motivated by a company's interests?

Is there a list of JEPs which includes the affiliation of the person proposing them? It would be interesting to see how many get approved. I would expect it's a lot easier to make progress from 'inside the tent' i.e. an employee of Oracle, Red Hat etc.

Having said that, from the link posted by carimura [0] it looks like the author of this one is doing an excellent job of engaging with Brian Goetz and others at oracle.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34485541

For motivation and to see who's involved there are a few other places you can go such as amber-dev [1] and his PR's [2].

[1] https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/amber-dev/2023-January/th...

[2] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+arc...