Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs(blog.codeberg.org)
blog.codeberg.org
Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html
159 comments
Tangential but one day when bored at work, I browsed the GitHub discussions for Helix, my main text editor, and the most active thread was regarding adopting an LLM policy for the repo[0]. The maintainer thought it would be beneficial to use an LLM policy similar to Ghostty which is AI friendly with human review. Now the whole topic is "brigaded" by a small number of extremely passionate anti-AI voices that immediately react positively to any pushback against AI usage and negatively to anyone who isn't staunchly anti-AI. Even when presented with, in my opinion, reasonable middle-ground such as only merging maintainable code, the counter-arguments are mostly against the harms of AI (mostly datacenter related) dismissing AI outright and refusal give an any ground.
It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply stop posting when they realize there is going to be no real debate, and the anti-AI individuals swarm on any new input.
My personal opinion is I don't care either way -- AI is a tool and if contributors use that tool to improve code or the product, I could care less. I just find this interesting.
[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408
It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply stop posting when they realize there is going to be no real debate, and the anti-AI individuals swarm on any new input.
My personal opinion is I don't care either way -- AI is a tool and if contributors use that tool to improve code or the product, I could care less. I just find this interesting.
[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408
We could call them software manufacturers - in the etymological sense (manu factus == made by hand).
There's another underlying theme when you consider Forgejo having Codeberg as a home - anti-commercialization / sensitivity to commercialization and breaking of trust in the ecosystem. I could see anti-LLM sentiment stemming from these things a bit, in terms of what the LLM's were trained on. It's like an evolution from the olden days of slashdot commenters ragging on M$ every chance they got - only now it's AI and slop.
Yep, different strokes for different folks.
I don't see the correlation here. You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig. I don't see any indicator of that.
I also don't see your points of contention - it may help to be more specific.
Last but not least, I am also not sure they are a community hub. This depends on how many people use codeberg. IMO it is still a niche right now; perhaps that will change, but right now I am not entirely certain it is a community hub per se when compared to github. But competition is good and if there are alternatives to fatso Microsoft controlling github, I am all up for that. The upcoming mandatory age sniffing will be a waterfall moment.
I also don't see your points of contention - it may help to be more specific.
Last but not least, I am also not sure they are a community hub. This depends on how many people use codeberg. IMO it is still a niche right now; perhaps that will change, but right now I am not entirely certain it is a community hub per se when compared to github. But competition is good and if there are alternatives to fatso Microsoft controlling github, I am all up for that. The upcoming mandatory age sniffing will be a waterfall moment.
> You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig.
I didn’t interpret GP that way. Rather, they were saying that like-minded projects are appropriately homed.
I didn’t interpret GP that way. Rather, they were saying that like-minded projects are appropriately homed.
Since the blog post doesn't actually include the change to the TOS and only links to it at the very end, here it is:
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
The justification given in the TOS is very different from those in the blog post. The TOS mentions copyright and the risk of malicious code. The blog post has a completely different list of justifications. The increased risk of malicious code only applies to unreviewed AI generated code, but the TOS does not reflect that.
The blog post is more consistent with the actual change to the TOS. It makes a lot more sense now. If the TOS are a problem then you can always use another host or self-host. Codeberg is intended for a specific type of project (open source license, public repo, encouraging collaboration etc.)
The blog post is more consistent with the actual change to the TOS. It makes a lot more sense now. If the TOS are a problem then you can always use another host or self-host. Codeberg is intended for a specific type of project (open source license, public repo, encouraging collaboration etc.)
I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright.
For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.
For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.
> People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output
In the US at least, the PTO has not said this. They have said that artwork is not copyrightable if it was substantially "generated" with little human input. They have not said anything about software or other creative works. And certainly nothing about software that has been carefully "vibe engineered" with lots of human input, direction, and review.
It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.
Now, if you just one shot the most advanced Tetris algorithm of all time and post it on the web without any scrutiny or review, and no input, then it's probably not going to be copyrightable.
In the US at least, the PTO has not said this. They have said that artwork is not copyrightable if it was substantially "generated" with little human input. They have not said anything about software or other creative works. And certainly nothing about software that has been carefully "vibe engineered" with lots of human input, direction, and review.
It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.
Now, if you just one shot the most advanced Tetris algorithm of all time and post it on the web without any scrutiny or review, and no input, then it's probably not going to be copyrightable.
What does the patent and trademark office have to do with the copyright office at LoC?
I agree that the copyright office has not said this either -- they have just said that you need to be a human to register a copyright.
I agree that the copyright office has not said this either -- they have just said that you need to be a human to register a copyright.
> It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.
Why would they have different rules for one potentially copyrightable material versus another?
What the PTO (courts, actually) have not said is how much and what kinds of work a human must perform to transform a machine-generated work into a copyrightable work. It could be that this would be domain specific (i.e. different rules for software and art). But totally different rules entirely for software and art? Seems unlikely to me.
Why would they have different rules for one potentially copyrightable material versus another?
What the PTO (courts, actually) have not said is how much and what kinds of work a human must perform to transform a machine-generated work into a copyrightable work. It could be that this would be domain specific (i.e. different rules for software and art). But totally different rules entirely for software and art? Seems unlikely to me.
Yes, my understanding is that there is some test, as yet not clearly defined, in the middle of those two extremes. At one extreme you let AI make all the choices and own nothing. At the other extreme you use AI more or less like a tab complete and own everything.
Legal ambiguity tends to have a chilling effect. Although I think this is overshadowed by hype at the moment.
> so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.
If something is not covered by copyright law then others do not need permission to copy it. However, you cannot impose conditions on copying it either (not even minimal conditions like the 2 clause BSD license).
However you can enforce licenses in jurisdictions where even pure vibe-coded LLM output is covered by copyright. So you might find yourself in a position where, for example, you can enforce the GPL on your vibe-coded software on someone in the UK, but not someone in the US.
If something is not covered by copyright law then others do not need permission to copy it. However, you cannot impose conditions on copying it either (not even minimal conditions like the 2 clause BSD license).
However you can enforce licenses in jurisdictions where even pure vibe-coded LLM output is covered by copyright. So you might find yourself in a position where, for example, you can enforce the GPL on your vibe-coded software on someone in the UK, but not someone in the US.
There is at this time no reason to believe that. We know an AI cannot own copyright in the US. We don't know that the author doesn't own it. And if they don't we don't know how much of their own manual effort on the output would make them own it.
If a photographer can own a point and click snap of a painting then I expect we'll land somewhere where LLM outputs are or can become owned by the tool weilder with at most some minimum effort.
If a photographer can own a point and click snap of a painting then I expect we'll land somewhere where LLM outputs are or can become owned by the tool weilder with at most some minimum effort.
Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source. How can you verify that the model you're using wasn't trained and therefore incorporates code that is not licensed for sharing. e.g. someone theoretically uploading the shared source windows kernel to github and it being added to copilot.
There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does not happen.
That's my problem with Linus's announcement regarding AI in the kernel -since the announcement I'm counting the days until we see SCO II Electric Boogaloo.
There's a lot of people with deep pockets and a deeper hatred of FOSS, and AI gives them the backdoor to take FOSS out -legally, on the grounds of province.
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is only my speculation from a layperson's point of view)
There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does not happen.
That's my problem with Linus's announcement regarding AI in the kernel -since the announcement I'm counting the days until we see SCO II Electric Boogaloo.
There's a lot of people with deep pockets and a deeper hatred of FOSS, and AI gives them the backdoor to take FOSS out -legally, on the grounds of province.
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is only my speculation from a layperson's point of view)
> Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source
That's not how copyright works. If you use a pirated copy of photoshop the resulting image is not illegal.
That's not how copyright works. If you use a pirated copy of photoshop the resulting image is not illegal.
That's apples and oranges; a better analogy would be if you post a video on youtube that you made yourself, with products you're allowed to use, but happen to overlook that copywritten music is on the radio in the background or on the tv.
How many youtube videos have gone dark over bogus copyright claims over the years? And you think people will overlook what's in AI -when there's over a trillion dollars on the table?
How many youtube videos have gone dark over bogus copyright claims over the years? And you think people will overlook what's in AI -when there's over a trillion dollars on the table?
If the resulting image contains copyrighted content, such as a snippet of photoshop's proprietary code, then it most certainly might be infringing.
It's not as simple as your reductive analogy. It's for a court to decide.
It's not as simple as your reductive analogy. It's for a court to decide.
The blog post did mention license laundering, which is one of the copyright issues with LLMs.
Interesting that the TOS contains the justification for the rule. That isn't necessarily something I would expect to see in a TOS and leaves the door open for people to dispute the justification or argue "well that's not relevant to THIS vibe coded project".
Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Like if you see a project on Codeberg you can reasonably expect it's probably not completely machine-generated slop, which is no longer an expectation I have for GitHub. People are getting offended about it but why not just use a different forge for your vibe-coded projects?
The main risk is that it leads to loads of distracting discussions about whether projects are "too vibe-coded" or whether they fall on the right side of the line. I would assume Codeberg would be relatively light touch about enforcement in marginal cases, which equally might blunt the effectiveness of the rule but ultimately, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Like if you see a project on Codeberg you can reasonably expect it's probably not completely machine-generated slop, which is no longer an expectation I have for GitHub. People are getting offended about it but why not just use a different forge for your vibe-coded projects?
The main risk is that it leads to loads of distracting discussions about whether projects are "too vibe-coded" or whether they fall on the right side of the line. I would assume Codeberg would be relatively light touch about enforcement in marginal cases, which equally might blunt the effectiveness of the rule but ultimately, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
I get that impression too. Seems like codeberg wants to be the hub for meaningful software, not a dump for any random file that happens to technically be free software.
See also: 100MB per-user quota for repos that are not meaningful software.
See also: 100MB per-user quota for repos that are not meaningful software.
i.e. the "think of the children" argument.
I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.
+1. Membership is open. The vote was given to members.
This is all reasonable.
I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.
This is all reasonable.
I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.
I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/116964029691087138 "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... and people ritually going through my other comments to downvote me, blah blah. It's all the hallmarks of an angry echo chamber.
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/116964029691087138 "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... and people ritually going through my other comments to downvote me, blah blah. It's all the hallmarks of an angry echo chamber.
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
I respect that you tried to argue with people so bound to black and white thinking that they have the need to filter out anyone with any ambivalence or diverging opinion that they are creating a closely monitored and moderated filter bubble at all. I'm just staying miles away from those codeberg, gitea, fediverse people. Sad and not beneficial to democracy, but why bother?
I think those people are trying to say that if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that. Unless the point of the project is to exactly balance at 50% AI code, then you know whether you're vibecoding or regular-coding.
Their comparison was to a no-Nazis rule, not to Nazis. That comparison works. Only vibecoders argue about the intricacies of a no-vibecoding rule, just like only Nazis argue about the intricacies of a no-Nazis rule. They aren't saying vibecoders are Nazis, they're saying both vibecoders and Nazis are dishonest and try to find loopholes in the rules and accidentally identify themselves by doing that. The people who argue about age of consent also do that, which is why the person mentioned rape.
Their comparison was to a no-Nazis rule, not to Nazis. That comparison works. Only vibecoders argue about the intricacies of a no-vibecoding rule, just like only Nazis argue about the intricacies of a no-Nazis rule. They aren't saying vibecoders are Nazis, they're saying both vibecoders and Nazis are dishonest and try to find loopholes in the rules and accidentally identify themselves by doing that. The people who argue about age of consent also do that, which is why the person mentioned rape.
The point is that the comparisons used in both cases are absolutely inappropriate. I never said they were saying vibecoders are Nazis or rapists. I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.
More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Like, it's clear many people in this community see themselves as violated in some sense by the actions of American AI companies. The emotional response is legitimate. Transitioning from that emotion to indiscriminate policy is not, and making comparisons like that in a public forum is distasteful.
As for "if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that" -- that is not the question. The question is the precise definitions of what "AI-written" means, because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island. Because like it or not based on your moral principles -- vast amounts of people are using these tools now. I can't say a majority because I don't have the numbers but it would absolutely not surprise me. And I can guarantee a large number of projects on codeberg use(d) them. So clarify in advance of the policy passing what the policy will be. Instead the language was left ambiguous so they could choose to exercise personal judgement.
Calling them stupid or dishonest is a dick move. People legitimately wanted to know.
More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Like, it's clear many people in this community see themselves as violated in some sense by the actions of American AI companies. The emotional response is legitimate. Transitioning from that emotion to indiscriminate policy is not, and making comparisons like that in a public forum is distasteful.
As for "if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that" -- that is not the question. The question is the precise definitions of what "AI-written" means, because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island. Because like it or not based on your moral principles -- vast amounts of people are using these tools now. I can't say a majority because I don't have the numbers but it would absolutely not surprise me. And I can guarantee a large number of projects on codeberg use(d) them. So clarify in advance of the policy passing what the policy will be. Instead the language was left ambiguous so they could choose to exercise personal judgement.
Calling them stupid or dishonest is a dick move. People legitimately wanted to know.
> I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.
Are they correct? That should be the most important thing.
> More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Maybe because they're correct
> because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island.
Thus outing themselves as AI projects. Nobody with a non-AI project doesn't know that it's non-AI.
Are they correct? That should be the most important thing.
> More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Maybe because they're correct
> because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island.
Thus outing themselves as AI projects. Nobody with a non-AI project doesn't know that it's non-AI.
Good grief. The question is simply "what is vibecoding?" You're taking the position (without saying so) that any use of AI in coding is banned: from Cursor autocomplete to full omp harness chugging with Fable, whether or not the person has taken decades to learn coding, whether or not the code was reviewed professionally.
I suspect the reason you're not saying this is because when you write it out, it's obviously a policy rooted in simplistic thinking, similar to "We won't host code if it was written in Emacs" or "We won't host code if it uses spaces instead of tabs."
I suspect the reason you're not saying this is because when you write it out, it's obviously a policy rooted in simplistic thinking, similar to "We won't host code if it was written in Emacs" or "We won't host code if it uses spaces instead of tabs."
No, the question is a classic case of jaqing off. Not a single person is in actual doubt which side of the line they fall on.
Your second paragraph is a strawman.
Your second paragraph is a strawman.
Not true. I have no idea if the "majority" of my recent projects was authored by AI. It's a hodge-podge that I've assembled by tweaking things myself, deleting wrong tracks, implementing touchy logic myself, and had AI do lots of boilerplate, over hundreds of commits and thousands of back and forth interactions.
In world where we cannot copyright facts, but we can copyright compendiums, we've demonstrated that we acknowledge the effort and value of curation. The way I use AI, I'm carefully curating what makes it into the released version, either by writing it myself or iterating with an AI to get it written.
You're just being dismissive.
In world where we cannot copyright facts, but we can copyright compendiums, we've demonstrated that we acknowledge the effort and value of curation. The way I use AI, I'm carefully curating what makes it into the released version, either by writing it myself or iterating with an AI to get it written.
You're just being dismissive.
Don't bother. You're talking to puritan fundamentalists. You're contaminated. They're angry the tools exist. And that anybody touched them. There's no gradient, no nuance. Just bad, and you are bad for even broaching the subject that there might be nuance.
Codeberg had no such policy a year ago when I joined, and nobody said anything about the topic in public until a few weeks ago... but people who committed anything which touched an AI to it... are also bad, and their projects should be expunged.
That's literally the level of discussion I see. If you asked them to clarify: ok, do you really mean my repository, what does "majority" mean, what do mean by AI? and their pure moral clarity is like... "seriously, you're a creep for even asking. You know you did the bad thing, so stop asking..."
I almost wish I could walk around with this level of dogmatism and pure moralistic clarity. It would make a lot of things simpler.
Codeberg had no such policy a year ago when I joined, and nobody said anything about the topic in public until a few weeks ago... but people who committed anything which touched an AI to it... are also bad, and their projects should be expunged.
That's literally the level of discussion I see. If you asked them to clarify: ok, do you really mean my repository, what does "majority" mean, what do mean by AI? and their pure moral clarity is like... "seriously, you're a creep for even asking. You know you did the bad thing, so stop asking..."
I almost wish I could walk around with this level of dogmatism and pure moralistic clarity. It would make a lot of things simpler.
Did you read the actual terms? It's quite clear, it says mostly written by AI.
Yeah, that doesn't mean anything in a world of agentic tooling. That's why folks are seeking clarification of what "mostly" means. Like more than 50% of the characters in the source code? From a harness? Tab-based autocomplete? Function completion? As I said, it's simplistic thinking.
If you aren't sure, then you're on the wrong side of it.
That's not true just because you say it is. You're rejecting the notion that the rule is written badly, and as an excuse for other problems, and, as written, is actually unenforceable. If I pushed my repos, they wouldn't even be able to tell that the code was written by AI, because I author every commit. Silly argument. Time will judge.
If you were on the right side of it, you'd know.
Right, I see I'm dealing with a fundamentalist.
I'll move on now.
I'll move on now.
There is no winning with this type of perpetually online activist. It is the moral prerogative of any open source project that wishes to achieve any success in the real world to gatekeep these sort of purity testers out. Thankfully, Mastodon has been invented as a containment zone.
zajio1am(2)
lol closed door voting is not democratic.
Not being a US citizen* means I cannot vote in US elections, thus it is a closed door vote by your reckoning and so the US is not democratic. Did I get that right?
*This is shorthand for me not being associated with the US in any way, but you are of course free to reply with all the edge cases that makes the point impossible to state briefly.
*This is shorthand for me not being associated with the US in any way, but you are of course free to reply with all the edge cases that makes the point impossible to state briefly.
Who do you think should be voting if not their active users?
Active members* ("mere" users can't vote).
But yeah, if you care about the project and want to participate in it (including having a say), you can become an active member.
https://join.codeberg.org/
But yeah, if you care about the project and want to participate in it (including having a say), you can become an active member.
https://join.codeberg.org/
It is still democratic, what would be you preferred way to do it?
“closed door” is a bit disingenuous considering any private individual codeberg user can apply to become an active voting member https://join.codeberg.org/
Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
Seems fine. A git host is not a particularly hard piece of software to self-maintain and there’s always GitHub for most things.
I can understand why. The cost to the host is entirely in volume of code, and creating volume is cheap now. Without some constraining measure they will have lots of AI code. Even just by itself that would make it impossible to have.
It’s also a cultural thing. This is for that niche of developers. That’s all right. Communities have their own (often-hyperspecific) rules. HN certainly does and we’re all here.
I can understand why. The cost to the host is entirely in volume of code, and creating volume is cheap now. Without some constraining measure they will have lots of AI code. Even just by itself that would make it impossible to have.
It’s also a cultural thing. This is for that niche of developers. That’s all right. Communities have their own (often-hyperspecific) rules. HN certainly does and we’re all here.
From their recent announcements it seems Codeberg is operating as a club that just so happens to have a git UI. Perhaps that is amusing if you're playing along, but I can't imagine why I should want to actually host anything at an org with this kind of governance.
It is fine to have corners of the internet that run in a particular way.
My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.
I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.
My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.
I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.
> Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github
Codeberg never was a full alternative to Github. From the start it's been an open platform, run by European non-profit, exclusively for Free and Open Source projects. I see the recent changes to be inline with their initial values and community they want to foster.
Codeberg never was a full alternative to Github. From the start it's been an open platform, run by European non-profit, exclusively for Free and Open Source projects. I see the recent changes to be inline with their initial values and community they want to foster.
Codeberg always limited private repositories since its inception. They were never set out to replace GitHub/GitLab.
As the other commenter said, they didn't change their values and target.
Also, these changes are enacted by members of the e.V. Nobody is forcing them to do something. It's all public and transparent.
As the other commenter said, they didn't change their values and target.
Also, these changes are enacted by members of the e.V. Nobody is forcing them to do something. It's all public and transparent.
Yeah, they are setting up a capricious environment which is hard to avoid with rules like this.
In the blog post they complain about AI-assisted projects being too polished, using CI resources even though it's a one-man project with zero users. (Reasons they don't give for banning it in the TOS)
So, what's the rule exactly? Can I set up release builds on my one-man project or not? What about when the clearly vibe-coded project does it, do I report them? Does everyone just remember to not check in their AGENTS.md when pushing to codeberg?
I think things should just cost money. Far better than a nonsensical honor system around LLMs which has the obvious outcome of hiding LLM use.
That said, they can foster what ever environment they want. I think it's just a regressive self-limiting view that tries to pretend like the world isn't changing with rules that have bad downstream outcomes, as opposed to a platform that accepts reality and figures out what to do from there. And I find that disappointing.
In the blog post they complain about AI-assisted projects being too polished, using CI resources even though it's a one-man project with zero users. (Reasons they don't give for banning it in the TOS)
So, what's the rule exactly? Can I set up release builds on my one-man project or not? What about when the clearly vibe-coded project does it, do I report them? Does everyone just remember to not check in their AGENTS.md when pushing to codeberg?
I think things should just cost money. Far better than a nonsensical honor system around LLMs which has the obvious outcome of hiding LLM use.
That said, they can foster what ever environment they want. I think it's just a regressive self-limiting view that tries to pretend like the world isn't changing with rules that have bad downstream outcomes, as opposed to a platform that accepts reality and figures out what to do from there. And I find that disappointing.
Codeberg sees themselves as more than just a service provider.
They're a community, and will serve according to that community.
If you're looking for a service provider, GitHub or even GitHub Enterprise might be a closer alignment to what you're looking for.
They're a community, and will serve according to that community.
If you're looking for a service provider, GitHub or even GitHub Enterprise might be a closer alignment to what you're looking for.
I kind of like the idea of a software forge that won't host the Torment Nexus discovered in 2027 because its TOS didn't contain language about it in 2026.
I run an open source project, contribute to others and in the last 6 months I've set up two homelabs (one at work, one at home) out of hard rubbish/ewaste running a bunch of open source software.
I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
From the maintainer standpoint, it basically eliminated entire classes of frustrating, tedious jobs that existed before - especially with regards to packaging and CI/CD
No longer do I have to do the back and forth dance of getting slightly further into a 20-minute build over the course of an evening until GitHub Actions finally produces a correct build. I just log into `gh`, give Claude the specs ("Please make it as statically-linked wherever sensible, support these platforms xyz back to versions abc") and it loops 2 or 3 times itself until the build is done.
If a user posts an issue, Claude can track it down in 15 minutes flat. Our issue backlog was cut by around 70% in a couple of months after Opus 4.5 was released - I could fix 5 issues in a coding session rather than 1, and new users who would vibecode a fix would often upstream the solution via PR.
As a user, deployment of many FOSS apps has gone from a nightmare to 15 minutes of prompting. I have a Claude skill that has the user accounts, IP addresses and configs of the servers. You just say "Install Immich on server xyz" and it does it. My wife says she wants the Immich photos on the Chromecast, I sign into adb and say "Make the Immich photos the screensaver on the Chromecast", and it installs ImmichFrame.
If I run into issues, instead of just giving up I'll just prompt a fix. I'll often clean things up, draft a PR and upstream it - and to be honest results have been mixed. Some maintainers (myself included) are appreciative that someone has upstreamed a fix that others can find useful, others are actively hostile to it and plenty more are just too busy to review the PRs.
I do empathise with them about the wasted CI/CD resources for small projects with a handful of users, but the rest just sounds academic and out-of-touch. From my own experience as an early adopter I've found that AI has massively increased my participation in the FOSS sphere - as a maintainer, contributor and consumer.
I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
From the maintainer standpoint, it basically eliminated entire classes of frustrating, tedious jobs that existed before - especially with regards to packaging and CI/CD
No longer do I have to do the back and forth dance of getting slightly further into a 20-minute build over the course of an evening until GitHub Actions finally produces a correct build. I just log into `gh`, give Claude the specs ("Please make it as statically-linked wherever sensible, support these platforms xyz back to versions abc") and it loops 2 or 3 times itself until the build is done.
If a user posts an issue, Claude can track it down in 15 minutes flat. Our issue backlog was cut by around 70% in a couple of months after Opus 4.5 was released - I could fix 5 issues in a coding session rather than 1, and new users who would vibecode a fix would often upstream the solution via PR.
As a user, deployment of many FOSS apps has gone from a nightmare to 15 minutes of prompting. I have a Claude skill that has the user accounts, IP addresses and configs of the servers. You just say "Install Immich on server xyz" and it does it. My wife says she wants the Immich photos on the Chromecast, I sign into adb and say "Make the Immich photos the screensaver on the Chromecast", and it installs ImmichFrame.
If I run into issues, instead of just giving up I'll just prompt a fix. I'll often clean things up, draft a PR and upstream it - and to be honest results have been mixed. Some maintainers (myself included) are appreciative that someone has upstreamed a fix that others can find useful, others are actively hostile to it and plenty more are just too busy to review the PRs.
I do empathise with them about the wasted CI/CD resources for small projects with a handful of users, but the rest just sounds academic and out-of-touch. From my own experience as an early adopter I've found that AI has massively increased my participation in the FOSS sphere - as a maintainer, contributor and consumer.
> I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
There are valid social, ecological and maybe philosophical concerns.
But on the technical aspects... I don't get it either. It's a wonderful tool. even if it didn't write a single line, the fact that it can analyse a source and explain things to me in context is a game changer.
There are valid social, ecological and maybe philosophical concerns.
But on the technical aspects... I don't get it either. It's a wonderful tool. even if it didn't write a single line, the fact that it can analyse a source and explain things to me in context is a game changer.
Codeberg's philosophy sounds really good, I build open source scientific research projects, would you advise me using this platform instead of Github for making my code public?
Depends if you require just public space for the project or if you also need the project to be part of social media network of Github. As "forge" Codeberg is pretty great. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.
What do you mean by "social media network of Github"?
Github is social network. People follow other peoples profiles, people discover projects using "explore", trending and star system.
Codeberg has some of these features but the networking effect there is pretty weak because there are way fewer people. Almost Every programmer is on Github.
Codeberg has some of these features but the networking effect there is pretty weak because there are way fewer people. Almost Every programmer is on Github.
[deleted]
Whether you're expecting to have contributors that all have GitHub accounts already. And whether you expect to use the network-effects (follows/stars/activity feed) to have your project be more discoverable.
Should I be concerned that many of my hobby projects are little "one-off software [projects] specific to my need"? Is Codeberg only for hosting large, community-driven projects that require long-term support? I certainly "don't actually have a community" around my (hand-written) solo projects.
Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.
Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.
My first push to Codeberg was 4 years ago. Back then I certainly got that they discourage small throwaway single-developer projects, and especially ones that are not FLOSS, and may exist only in the user's private repo. I pushed anyways, none of my projects took off, and they're basically just sitting there abandoned.
I get the feeling I should move the repos to my own Forgejo instance out of respect soon enough, but I'm certain they will not be deleted any time soon, at least not without me being notified of it. It's a community, not a corporation.
I get the feeling I should move the repos to my own Forgejo instance out of respect soon enough, but I'm certain they will not be deleted any time soon, at least not without me being notified of it. It's a community, not a corporation.
Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
> The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic
The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.
The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.
Not sure what good you see. Recent history events show that whatever the US is, it is certainly not good.
There's an interesting tension between "censorship" and "ideology" here.
On the one hand I think organisations taking pure ideological stands is healthy for society as a general behaviour, rather than appealing to the masses and business insentives as GitHub would; on the other hand that can technically manifest as censorship in some cases.
But that's ok as long as we have more than one of a type. The answer to disagreement with one small organisation or projects ideology is to make another one, which is exactly what the author has done in the extreme (host my own damn git). This is the same thing that democratizes FOSS, projects can be ideological dictatorships, that's ok because they can be forked and no one is forced to stay. It also allows individual projects to efficiently follow their ideology or principles without the machinery of democracy getting in their way... It's the best of both.
On the one hand I think organisations taking pure ideological stands is healthy for society as a general behaviour, rather than appealing to the masses and business insentives as GitHub would; on the other hand that can technically manifest as censorship in some cases.
But that's ok as long as we have more than one of a type. The answer to disagreement with one small organisation or projects ideology is to make another one, which is exactly what the author has done in the extreme (host my own damn git). This is the same thing that democratizes FOSS, projects can be ideological dictatorships, that's ok because they can be forked and no one is forced to stay. It also allows individual projects to efficiently follow their ideology or principles without the machinery of democracy getting in their way... It's the best of both.
I wonder how this turns out longer-term. Obviously more and more software development is moving to LLMs. But depending on how principled codeberg ends up about enforcing this, a project being on codeberg might end up as a strong signal that the project is not ai-slop (either made by hand, or at least by humans who care about the project)
I think that's what Codeberg wants. It wants to be the hub of good software, not the dumping ground for random code files that GitHub turned into.
A hub of mostly human written software would be enough. It remains to be seen whether that results in measurably better quality code over the long term.
Think about all the random git repos you've probably created for little scripts. Codeberg doesn't want to be a dumping ground for those. It wants to be a hub for software that actually matters, at least a little bit.
I would love to see other people's random little scripts. Those things tend to go hard on usefulness per amount of code.
Well start a website called Scriptberg
I wonder whether people moving to development LLM and people moving away from LLM will create a divide comfortable for both parties or not.
I would hope so, that split would be a natural parting of the communities.
My pessimism tells me that the more any community rejects LLM and polices against generated output, the heavier they would be crawled. Which means that proLLM community by nature puts pressure on all antiLLM infrastructure – an asymmetrical problem, where other people pay for your choice.
My optimism, on the other hand, tells me that after bubble pop, hopefully, far less people would have money to feed aimless crawl results into machine learning algorithm in hopes of slight improvements.
I would hope so, that split would be a natural parting of the communities.
My pessimism tells me that the more any community rejects LLM and polices against generated output, the heavier they would be crawled. Which means that proLLM community by nature puts pressure on all antiLLM infrastructure – an asymmetrical problem, where other people pay for your choice.
My optimism, on the other hand, tells me that after bubble pop, hopefully, far less people would have money to feed aimless crawl results into machine learning algorithm in hopes of slight improvements.
thanks for addressing the source of the problems as `LLMs` and not AI in general.
I'm guessing this is probably why I've been unable to connect to Codeberg with my very much human-driven browser...
Most of the discussion before this official post:
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
I mean, they have every right to adopt that policy... but because of the policy, I can't see myself CHOOSING to use Codeberg.
I don’t currently use LLMs for any significant part of my work but I’m not willing to put myself in a position where I might someday have to prove that something WASN'T written with an LLM because someone is making spurious accusations to troll or "DoS" a project.
It's unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of alternatives where this isn't a concern at all. Why open yourself or your projects to this?
I don’t currently use LLMs for any significant part of my work but I’m not willing to put myself in a position where I might someday have to prove that something WASN'T written with an LLM because someone is making spurious accusations to troll or "DoS" a project.
It's unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of alternatives where this isn't a concern at all. Why open yourself or your projects to this?
Kudos to them and others who take a principled stance against LLM crapola.
How are they going to scan for LLM use? Oh wait..
Codeberg kind of positions itself as an alternative to github here. Granted, you can find many differences and say that github is huge, codeberg is tiny, but this is much more about momentum. People are angry about many things, including big greedy US corporations milking people or AI slop spamming them down; this frustration of people increases, which in turn helps create more competition because people will look more for alternatives. How much of that momentum shifts into real adoption is another matter, but it is an initial seed. My own use case is that ever since the orange king and his cronies seized power, I don't want my money to go into that mafia. Trump kills the little good-will reputation the USA still may have. It also does not help that recently another Epstein-buddy (Daniel Siad) "suicided" in France; we all know that the US "justice" system will never go to uncover all billionaires who participated here, yet alone put them in jail.
arkwin(6)
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
This seems fully orthogonal to whether LLMs are used or not
This seems fully orthogonal to whether LLMs are used or not
I suspect that in reality it is not.
It is in a philosophy class or a court of law, but it certainly isn't to a software forge! They are being proactive about stamping out LLM slop.
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them.
Really? You've read their minds and have determined that this is what they're actually thinking?
> We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries.
People doing this before LLMs wasn't a problem, for some reason.
> Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
If you want traction, you need to plan out your optimal territory. Not everyone does this well.
> We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Then kick people off. Alienate them so that they go with less judgmental hosting.
> The training and deployment of LLMs has drastically raised the cost of buying hardware, in particular for SSDs and memory. it is money that we can not spend elsewhere to improve our service and foster the mission of Codeberg.
Tough. You knew that you'd be affected by market changes when you went in on this venture. Don't go crying about it now.
> These price hikes also lead to a growing digital divide: Small and even large operators are endangered by rising costs, while only the largest cloud companies have reliable agreements for hardware.
Yes, because the few producers of said hardware decided to follow the money. And guess what? They left the fertile ground of their previous market behind, ripe for new competitors to move in (and they're already starting). This is the market at work.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer ...
This is the primary reason to avoid these guys. Activist vendors are among the most dangerous because of their capriciousness. Especially when they start railing against the market they operate in.
Really? You've read their minds and have determined that this is what they're actually thinking?
> We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries.
People doing this before LLMs wasn't a problem, for some reason.
> Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
If you want traction, you need to plan out your optimal territory. Not everyone does this well.
> We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Then kick people off. Alienate them so that they go with less judgmental hosting.
> The training and deployment of LLMs has drastically raised the cost of buying hardware, in particular for SSDs and memory. it is money that we can not spend elsewhere to improve our service and foster the mission of Codeberg.
Tough. You knew that you'd be affected by market changes when you went in on this venture. Don't go crying about it now.
> These price hikes also lead to a growing digital divide: Small and even large operators are endangered by rising costs, while only the largest cloud companies have reliable agreements for hardware.
Yes, because the few producers of said hardware decided to follow the money. And guess what? They left the fertile ground of their previous market behind, ripe for new competitors to move in (and they're already starting). This is the market at work.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer ...
This is the primary reason to avoid these guys. Activist vendors are among the most dangerous because of their capriciousness. Especially when they start railing against the market they operate in.
Huzzah! This is excellent news. Safe spaces and healthy communities are borne from enforcing strict moderation to keep the bad actors out. This is an important step forward for the platform.
The article literally says they intend to selectively enforce this rule and not be strict with it?
... and leave it completely up to their own personal judgement on when and how to apply their rules, and on public forums people who asked for more clarity on "boundaries" were called "creeps" and other insults.
That's not healthy democratic culture.
That's not healthy democratic culture.
Not a single person is unaware if their projects are handwritten or vibe coded. Nobody is actually confused or concerned, you are just jaqing off.
Called by whom?
Since when is Codeberg responsible of the Internet culture?
Since when is Codeberg responsible of the Internet culture?
Said community calling itself a community and behaving in a way on the community forums that encompass such community is... yes, take responsibility.
I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stance they're taking. They should have a community hub, and now they do.