This is an article about a giant pot of questionably earned money buying influence in a software ecosystem that he's been a big part of. But this is hardly the first time for this, in other cases the pot of questionably earned money came from selling people's data for ads or from Windows licenses.
The question in all of these cases is what specific bad influences the money can have on the software ecosystem and how community standards and governance can mitigate them. I don't really see a lot of answers in this article besides ill-defined ethical compromise of developers. I skimmed the book he mentioned (The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism) which sounds interesting but it doesn't really make its own case very well: half of the "extremist" citations are from anonymous online commenters and you can't go 2 paragraphs without straight up name-calling and ham-fisted guilt by association.
It's not buying influence, it's "blood money" -- profiting from crime by selling things to criminals. When Prada sells luxury clothes to drug lords, the problem isn't that the drug lords influence Prada
The question in all of these cases is what specific bad influences the money can have on the software ecosystem and how community standards and governance can mitigate them. I don't really see a lot of answers in this article besides ill-defined ethical compromise of developers. I skimmed the book he mentioned (The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism) which sounds interesting but it doesn't really make its own case very well: half of the "extremist" citations are from anonymous online commenters and you can't go 2 paragraphs without straight up name-calling and ham-fisted guilt by association.