Technically speaking, the persons and/or organizations that develop the major Bitcoin softwares own Bitcoin though. It is much like the ownership of World Wide Web: nobody owns WWW in the traditional sense, but the browser vendors and (sometimes) web developers can acts as the owner of WWW in the limited but profound way. That's why the independent implementation and verification is important even when everything is open, and Bitcoin is no exception. (Not that the OP is correct about its claim though.)
It’s worst. Browser incompatibilities don’t break the web, and sometimes only affect the people that want pixel perfect rendering. With Bitcoin, all the nodes have not only to implement the “abstract” protocol, but be bug compatible with the “official” node (where official is whichever has the “51%” hashing power). Any incompatibility will cause a fork eventually.
> The Bitcoin core development team has worked to limit transaction malleability. There is broad agreement in the community that this needs to be eliminated. Finding the best and most responsible solution will take time. In the meantime, users of the reference implementation do not need to be concerned. Transactions are always tracked properly by the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind software.
Sure atm they have the most influence. But there are a lot of wallet implementations for Bitcoin already. Not sure about the nodes - anyway, if the developers were to do something extreme, I think forks would emerge quickly.
