What, do you sincerely believe Palantir is pulling the strings behind Ladybird? What is the accusation here? Everybody can be "connected" in some way or another, but it's meaningless.
I think it's more a concern about the company one keeps; Ladybird's Andreas Kling has certainly ruffled feathers over the past couple of years by doubling down on anti-inclusionary language takes ("I'm not against gender neutral language, I'm just not going to allow it in my project") and supporting DHH's most douchebaggiest takes.
I understand that not everybody cares about this sort of thing, believing that politics of developers should be irrelevant; I'm personally not going to go around ringing the shame bell at people who use Ladybird (or Rails. But Kling loudly shouting "I support the free speech rights of fascists but get away from me with that DEI shit" doesn't give me warm fuzzies about using Ladybird, either. It's a lot easier to let politics of developers be irrelevant if the developers aren't out there energetically sharing them.
I've never understood that stance because surely the mere threat (even implied) of a sponsor removing thousands in funding would be enough to exert influence on the project.
The sponsor money is used to pay developers to work on Ladybird so a major sponsor pulling out could mean laying off core developers, which the project would obviously be motivated to prevent.
To be clear, that source is happy to lie about their own identity and run away from basic questions. I'd treat this as another ill-baked cancel campaign unless someone actually credible speaks up
It's very naive to believe the "no influence" part. I will never give to Ladybird given their closeness with fascists. Is that the kind of influence they expect?
Great...