Ladybird has a close relationship with FUTO which is a pretty oddly behaved private for-profit company ran by a bored multi-millionaire.
Great...
4 steps is not so bad
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.
Ladybird has been pretty clear that they will accept money from pretty much anybody but that funding will not provide influence.
I mean, they mostly make sure sponsors websites look good in Ladybird but even that seems like a low priority if you watch them.
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
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.
Ladybird has taken sponsorship money from FUTO and claims publicly that sponsorship provides no influence.