> The dude is literally bankrolled by the Koch Industries.

This is just a straw man. Who cares who pays him? I could say the same thing for:

Typescript. It's literally bankrolled by Microsoft, insert quip that says Typescript devs can't have good intentions here

Tensorflow. It's literally bankrolled by Google, insert quip that says tensorflow devs can't have good intentions here

React. It's literally bankrolled by Facebook/Meta, insert quip that says React Framework devs can't have good intentions here

Etc.

Maybe you don't care, but I care and so do many people. I'd argue you should also care.

Knowing where the money comes from is fundamental is so many aspect of our society.

Getting a loan from a bank will require you to disclose some information about your money getting activities. Why? First to make sure nothing illegal is going on, and second to make sure you will be able to pay back the loan.

Running your political campaign will require you to disclose how it's financed. Again why? Because people realized long ago that you don't bite the hand that is feeding you or something. Meaning you should expect a strong bias by that politician for their backers.

And so why care about a public figure getting money from the Koch Industries? Because it adds a crucial information on how to process the opinions coming out of that public figure.

Yes it's possible that the source of money doesn't affect anything, but it's also highly possible that it does and many times it does, so why not care about it?

It’s not a straw man if I am replying directly to a claim:

> not just the mouthpiece of some think tank ad campaign.

All of those are true! Those projects serve their corporate masters, not you-the-user.

If you get some benefit from using them as a dev, it's either incidental or part of a larger plan to lure you into their corporate "ecosystem" (think: why is React so much more dominant than Vue or Svelte?)

This was the first I'd heard of this and thought it sounded interesting, so I looked into it.

If I were a fact-checker, I guess I'd rate this as "mostly false". He's not "bankrolled by Koch Industries", but he runs a non-profit which publicly discloses donors and one of the Koch brothers donated some money to it.

But it did lead me down an interesting far-left rabbit hole, where the worldview is that a guy saying "respect people doing blue collar jobs" and encouraging people to keep working to improve their lives is treated as a nefarious enemy, so that was fun. A good reminder that QAnon doesn't have a monopoly an eyeroll-inducing political views.

What a hot take, I may have spent too much time on the internet myself today.