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If a project with half a dozen developers put political messages from those developers in their release notes, I'd think that was fine.

But I disapprove of the people writing the release notes for a Rust release putting messages of their choice in there, because they don't have a mandate to speak on behalf of the people whose work they're showcasing.

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IMO the same goes for packages printing political messages on startup. You don't have a right to hijack the voices of your users to spread your agenda, no matter how righteous that agenda is.

In what sense does a startup message “hijack the voice of the user”? I don’t think anybody who uses a computer genuinely believes that the startup splash for a program expresses an opinion held by the end user; it’s not like Linux’s penguin splash communicates a private mental state about chubby penguins on my part.

Your users are people who compile software with your package. That software could be run on their server (in which case your political message appears harmlessly in their logs), or it could be distributed to other parties.

Those other parties would then read in their logs, "I distribute software that has an insecure supply chain and relies on people who are not mature enough to avoid grandstanding at every opportunity."

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