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Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
- jaredcwhite 2mo agoHuzzah! 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.
- bcye 2mo agoThe article literally says they intend to selectively enforce this rule and not be strict with it?
- cmrdporcupine 2mo ago... 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.
- xeyownt 2mo agoCalled by whom? Since when is Codeberg responsible of the Internet culture?
- cmrdporcupine 2mo agoSaid community calling itself a community and behaving in a way on the community forums that encompass such community is... yes, take responsibility.
- hananova 2mo agoNot a single person is unaware if their projects are handwritten or vibe coded. Nobody is actually confused or concerned, you are just jaqing off.
- TheChaplain 2mo agoI 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.
- youre-wrong3 2mo ago[flagged]
- falsemyrmidon 2mo agoWho do you think should be voting if not their active users?
- jraph 2mo agoActive 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/ https://join.codeberg.org/
- SiempreViernes 2mo agoNot 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.
- flir 2mo ago[flagged]
- stuartjohnson12 2mo agoHe did attack the argument - he argued reductio ad absurdum that classifying "democratic" as "open to everyone" wouldn't be a sensible definition, because the argument would set such a high bar for democracy that no state is democratic. The irony of this comment is that leaning back and snarkily accusing someone of "playing internet" is precisely the kind of disengagement you're complaining about.
- BrenBarn 2mo agoKudos to them and others who take a principled stance against LLM crapola.
- superdisk 2mo ago[flagged]
- wongarsu 2mo agoI 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)
- inigyou 2mo agoI 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.
- e2le 2mo agoA 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.
- inigyou 2mo agoThink 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo agoI would love to see other people's random little scripts. Those things tend to go hard on usefulness per amount of code.
- inigyou 2mo agoWell start a website called Scriptberg
- lesostep 2mo agoI 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.
- nylonstrung 2mo ago> 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
- ioasuncvinvaer 2mo agoI suspect that in reality it is not.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- Daffrin 2mo ago[flagged]
- endre 2mo agothanks for addressing the source of the problems as `LLMs` and not AI in general.
- croemer 2mo agoSince 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/96fac426a32d1ba91ff879366d59bf1af54080c2 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
- conartist6 2mo agoI 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.
- graemep 2mo ago> 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.
- singpolyma3 2mo agoThere 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.
- kstenerud 2mo ago[flagged]
- grokcodec 2mo agoMany 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.
- JohnFen 2mo ago> 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.
- xeyownt 2mo agoNot sure what good you see. Recent history events show that whatever the US is, it is certainly not good.
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- hamburgererror 2mo agoCodeberg'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?
- omnimus 2mo agoDepends 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.
- hamburgererror 2mo agoWhat do you mean by "social media network of Github"?
- omnimus 2mo agoGithub 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sjs382 2mo agoWhether 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.
- arkwin 2mo ago[flagged]
- bombcar 2mo agoIt's a tragedy of the commons problem - if you allow LLM code, you get an infinite sewer of shitty commits from people who don't know you or care about you - so you close the door to everything. Nobody wants to admit that we're going to have to go back to personal, verified relationships (it's who you know, not what you do) to fix it, unless we come up with something new. Same problem with Eternal September - there was an "artificial" gateway that is now gone, but the need for some form of gateway still exists.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo ago> You are not creating software with the exact rules that I have made up in my head on how software should be made, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you and the code you make. The funny thing about this comment is out of the gate it screams the exact reason people don't want the LLM generated code in their zone. This reads similar to people who make prompt art getting upset that they're not taken seriously. People demand respect for something they didn't earn. Programmers who have worked hard for their knowledge don't want to listen to the person who thinks they know everything because the magical machine spit out some working code. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. They're annoying and entitled. I'll just paste the classic Ian Malcom Jurassic Park quote. > I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox
- arkwin 2mo agoI can see the point you are trying to make, and I'll make a counterpoint to that. When you play the "didn't earn" card, you are really getting nowhere. It's a bad argument. It's putting up the gate, "I feel you didn't work hard enough for X result, but I did, so I must be better" I drive a manual car. Should I hate every automatic car driver? I have a master's degree in cybersecurity; should I shit on everyone who doesn't when they try to mention anything involving cybersecurity? I mean, I have a piece of paper that says I've earned it? On some level, yes. I would listen to the advice of a doctor over a random person on the internet. On another level, it's like saying, " Oh, you didn't have a blacksmith handcraft that knife for you, and you bought some machine-made knife? We should ban machine-made knives; the person making a knife using a machine didn't 'earn it '." Perhaps you shouldn't create code; after all, you probably didn't develop a compiler. Or the computer chip running it... Or the OS.. Did you really earn the right to develop something?
- tptacek 2mo agoThis makes sense. The largest project hosted on Codeberg today is, what, Zig? Zig is also openly hostile to LLM agents. It's a a clear identity for the site: a home for projects that identify as anti-LLM. 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.
- shevy-java 2mo agoI 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.
- zbentley 2mo ago> 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.
- sanderjd 2mo agoYep, different strokes for different folks.
- veganmosfet 2mo agoWe could call them software manufacturers - in the etymological sense (manu factus == made by hand).
- nazgulsenpai 2mo agoTangential 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 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoMost of the discussion before this official post: Codeberg bans vibe coded projects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
- shevy-java 2mo agoCodeberg 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.
- somnium_sn 2mo agoIt 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.
- archargelod 2mo ago> 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.
- bayindirh 2mo agoCodeberg 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.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- evantbyrne 2mo agoFrom 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.
- Sophira 2mo agoI'm guessing this is probably why I've been unable to connect to Codeberg with my very much human-driven browser...
- AussieWog93 2mo agoI 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.
- JodieBenitez 2mo ago> 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.
- arjie 2mo agoSeems 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.
- VariousPrograms 2mo agoShould 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.
- FireInsight 2mo agoMy 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.
- outlore 2mo agoHow are they going to scan for LLM use? Oh wait..
- sjs382 2mo agoI 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?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hounainehamiani 2mo ago[flagged]