5 ms·

Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs

129 points by progval 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
lantry 1mo ago
> The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content: > - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies > The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect. > As with our other policy changes, the intention is to roll this out slowly and thoughtfully. Each possible violation will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and we are open to making exceptions.
- gilrain 1mo ago
  It would be less misleading to also include: > Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.
  - abound 1mo ago
    I think this is more of a nitpick than anything. SourceHut is a code forge, code forges are where you store your code (and tickets). The policy going forward is a ban on using LLMs to write code (and tickets). The use cases listed there (reviewing work, asking questions, etc) are minority use cases and mostly would be unenforceable even if included in the policy.
    - gilrain 1mo ago
      It's not a nitpuck to me: reading the comment I replied to, I assumed I needed to cancel my Sourcehut subscription. In fact, I don't. That's a lot of information to've left out of so many pull quotes.
      - no-name-here 1mo ago
        Your worry was that if you used AI for things other than generating code/tickets/communication/assets, that you couldn't use sourceforge?
        gilrain 1mo ago
        Correct. This is specifically what covered my uses of the service: > to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis
lycopodiopsida 1mo ago
I am a paying supporter and I am considering to stop paying. This policy is a) dumb b) unenforceable. I pay them for infrastructure and service, not for some pseudo-moral ideas about how I should write my code. My code is as little of their concern, as things happening in my own house.
- Avshalom 1mo ago
  You are literally paying them to be concerned about your code.
  - theshrike79 1mo ago
    Paying to store my code, not paying for them to police who or what wrote it or assisted in writing it.
  - lycopodiopsida 1mo ago
    Nah - all my repos are private, they mostly contain my configs and I am not paying money to read these insanities about tools I use. As much as I like paying to escape a capitalistic monstrosity such as github, they still seem to be more … mentally stable, for the lack of a better term. At least you are not at a whim of some BDFL or an aggressive minority of radicals. It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only, with nothing in between just providing good service to paying customers.
    - enriquto 1mo ago
      > It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only (...) Maybe this is a question of point of view? I find github's stance on slop extremely radical (and totally contrary to my own values). At the same time, github is obviously enshittified, so I don's see the point in using it anymore. You still have gitlab, which is some kind of middle ground. And if you only need to store private config files, you can host a private instance of forgejo--or a bare git repo--for much less than a sourcehut subscription. I hope you find your place! (still, I'm curious why your config files are AI slop, but that is another subject)
irealis 1mo ago
I've been a paying customer since... pretty much since I've first seen the project, which has been quite a few years. I've always known the srht founders as rather strongly opinionated - for better and worse. This has always bothered me a bit, but I still strongly preferred it to Github and the likes. And it didn't hit me either with the cryptocurrency related bans. Unfortunately this time, it does. And not because the policy is an anti complete slop policy, but because it bans relatively (at least to me) reasonable AI use as well. Disappointing, sad, but not surprising. Moral grandstanding in the face of AI does little, it's already here to stay, whether we like it or not. I wish there were reasonable alternatives.
- Towaway69 1mo ago
  > I wish there were reasonable alternatives. CodeBerg ... oh sorry this isn't about GitHub being dead again /s Well I guess the alternative, in this case, is GitHub or have they also changed their ToS/TaC? I've stuck to GitHub while others have migrated away. I've been amused by the changes in ToS/TaC related to AI and now wondering whether I will just stick to GH. And I don't even use AI generated code ... the irony of it all!
vnorilo 1mo ago
I use LLMs at work without much thought by now. I'm also contributing a little bit to Sourcehut and keep my personal projects there. While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree. When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".
Nnnes 1mo ago
Summary of the mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N.2FTBDFREZH699@ddevault.org%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....) - counted by hand without LLM assistance so there may be mistakes or misreadings :) ~51 in favor of the proposal. 20 of those specifically stated a desire for a blanket or as-strong-as-possible ban. 17 mentioned paying for the service. Many (sorry, didn't count these!) stated that the reason they joined SourceHut in the first place is because of the strongly opinionated culture and that an LLM ban aligns well with that. ~19 opposing the proposal to some degree. (I am counting Greg K-H's comments as a very weak "oppose".) 5 specifically mentioned paying for the service, and 1 stated they will stop paying if the policy takes effect. Some stated that they don't personally use LLMs, or don't like them or the effects they have, or would support a weaker ban (e.g. only ban fully vibe-coded projects or excessive resource usage).
- ahepp 1mo ago
  >mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....) That is certainly one way to decide what to do with the data your customers paid you to store...
Zambyte 1mo ago
Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies. I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now. [1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ [2] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-cop...
- klardotsh 1mo ago
  While I am 100% with you that we've arrived at the place local GPUs can do real, good work and that it helps combat the energy arguments against certain LLM usage, Drew is not likely to agree with you. I can't find it on a quick search which tells me I'm probably remembering it from his prior Mastodon account, but I distinctly remember Drew once talking about how gaming GPUs were part of the (climate) problem and that we should all take notes from the Nintendo Switch in terms of gaming joy delivered per watt. This is not to say I disagree with Drew's desire for efficiency, even in gaming. This is simply to say: from my recollection of that blog/toot thread/whatever it was, even home LLM usage won't meet what I recall his energy bar to be, until we've got planning and orchestrator models that fit on a non-flagship phone.
  - landl0rd 1mo ago
    This seems really odd given that Drew chose to write and continues to maintain Sourcehut in a language that is one to two orders of magnitude less energy-efficient than C (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642321000022 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016764232...) I wouldn't consider this particularly hypocritical for even most people opposed to computing at the gigawatt scale, but for someone who believes a 3060 is over the line it's another story.
pnikosis 1mo ago
I don't know how this can be enforced, there's a lot of room for interpretation, making projects at risk to be banned. > - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies and > Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy. So from what I understand it is OK to use AI for security reviews privately but is not cool to host a project that allows to do that? Also, what does it mean "and so on"? Like "anything we consider we don't allow at some point?"
enriquto 1mo ago
Just to add a datapoint to the discussion: as a paying customer of sourcehut I 100% support this anti-slop policy. I'd prefer if some terms were stated somewhat more precisely, but it's great as it is.
scarlet03694 1mo ago
[flagged]
robotmay 1mo ago
Sigh, frustrating for me but I guess I understand the rationale, if not the implementation. I'm retired from programming professionally and I liked using Sourcehut for my personal projects because it just got out of my way, and I could put my mostly-old open source projects up there without worrying about people trying to contribute to them thanks to the friction of the system. I do slop-code hobby projects because I'm pretty much done with programming for fun now, but they're always private and I know that my relative load is low as I don't do much different from how I would personally use it. Personally I'm in favour of blocking LLM pull requests/merge requests/patches to open source repos - the sheer volume of crap is out of this world. I saw a repo with 1.1k unmerged PRs yesterday! The code can be from an LLM but the request to merge it damn well better be written by a human. I'm not going to put effort into reviewing something someone else couldn't be bothered to even write a blurb for. But for private projects, just shove a rate limiter on the endpoints and be done with it. Lately I'm very conflicted about software development as a whole. I've always aspired to be good, both in my work and in my relationship with others in the industry. But I can't be arsed any more - the joy has gone out of software, and I just want it to be done and out of my way. And now I have to move my photography portfolio repo that has fewer commits per day than I could write by hand, because there can't be grey areas or compromise on the modern internet. I used to work for GitLab, for what it's worth (and they've gone quite far down the AI toilet), and I honestly don't think I can be arsed setting up that or anything else. I might as well just shove bare repos on my NAS and go do something I actually enjoy.
coder-pm 1mo ago
Hah, llm detection is unreliable so a ToS like that can’t be enforced that way… that change moves responsibility to contributors who will break it, what about the autocomplete, refactoring tools?
yoz-y 1mo ago
I respect their decision. I’ll move my private slop repos to a self hosted instance. I don’t think that features like tickets and mailing lists matter for vibe coded projects anyway. They are made for an audience of one.
tomsonj 1mo ago
sourcehut is too weird to live, too rare to die
kuon 1mo ago
They put goaway on mailing list archives and I cannot read them anymore. I understand they are combating bots but this is going a bit too far. LLM policy is similar, I understand the argument against large players, but we have local LLM which can help, so the policy would require more nuance.
nvarsj 1mo ago
Well I guess it’s time to move my repos and stop paying. The moralism here is ridiculous. My code is my own, sorry.

129 points by progval 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

> The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content: > - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies > The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect. > As with our other policy changes, the intention is to roll this out slowly and thoughtfully. Each possible violation will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and we are open to making exceptions.

gilrain 1mo ago
It would be less misleading to also include: > Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.
- abound 1mo ago
  I think this is more of a nitpick than anything. SourceHut is a code forge, code forges are where you store your code (and tickets). The policy going forward is a ban on using LLMs to write code (and tickets). The use cases listed there (reviewing work, asking questions, etc) are minority use cases and mostly would be unenforceable even if included in the policy.
  - gilrain 1mo ago
    It's not a nitpuck to me: reading the comment I replied to, I assumed I needed to cancel my Sourcehut subscription. In fact, I don't. That's a lot of information to've left out of so many pull quotes.
    - no-name-here 1mo ago
      Your worry was that if you used AI for things other than generating code/tickets/communication/assets, that you couldn't use sourceforge?
      - gilrain 1mo ago
        Correct. This is specifically what covered my uses of the service: > to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis

lycopodiopsida 1mo ago

I am a paying supporter and I am considering to stop paying. This policy is a) dumb b) unenforceable. I pay them for infrastructure and service, not for some pseudo-moral ideas about how I should write my code. My code is as little of their concern, as things happening in my own house.

Avshalom 1mo ago
You are literally paying them to be concerned about your code.
- theshrike79 1mo ago
  Paying to store my code, not paying for them to police who or what wrote it or assisted in writing it.
- lycopodiopsida 1mo ago
  Nah - all my repos are private, they mostly contain my configs and I am not paying money to read these insanities about tools I use. As much as I like paying to escape a capitalistic monstrosity such as github, they still seem to be more … mentally stable, for the lack of a better term. At least you are not at a whim of some BDFL or an aggressive minority of radicals. It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only, with nothing in between just providing good service to paying customers.
  - enriquto 1mo ago
    > It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only (...) Maybe this is a question of point of view? I find github's stance on slop extremely radical (and totally contrary to my own values). At the same time, github is obviously enshittified, so I don's see the point in using it anymore. You still have gitlab, which is some kind of middle ground. And if you only need to store private config files, you can host a private instance of forgejo--or a bare git repo--for much less than a sourcehut subscription. I hope you find your place! (still, I'm curious why your config files are AI slop, but that is another subject)

irealis 1mo ago

I've been a paying customer since... pretty much since I've first seen the project, which has been quite a few years. I've always known the srht founders as rather strongly opinionated - for better and worse. This has always bothered me a bit, but I still strongly preferred it to Github and the likes. And it didn't hit me either with the cryptocurrency related bans. Unfortunately this time, it does. And not because the policy is an anti complete slop policy, but because it bans relatively (at least to me) reasonable AI use as well. Disappointing, sad, but not surprising. Moral grandstanding in the face of AI does little, it's already here to stay, whether we like it or not. I wish there were reasonable alternatives.

Towaway69 1mo ago
> I wish there were reasonable alternatives. CodeBerg ... oh sorry this isn't about GitHub being dead again /s Well I guess the alternative, in this case, is GitHub or have they also changed their ToS/TaC? I've stuck to GitHub while others have migrated away. I've been amused by the changes in ToS/TaC related to AI and now wondering whether I will just stick to GH. And I don't even use AI generated code ... the irony of it all!

vnorilo 1mo ago

I use LLMs at work without much thought by now. I'm also contributing a little bit to Sourcehut and keep my personal projects there. While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree. When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".

Nnnes 1mo ago

Summary of the mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N.2FTBDFREZH699@ddevault.org%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....) - counted by hand without LLM assistance so there may be mistakes or misreadings :) ~51 in favor of the proposal. 20 of those specifically stated a desire for a blanket or as-strong-as-possible ban. 17 mentioned paying for the service. Many (sorry, didn't count these!) stated that the reason they joined SourceHut in the first place is because of the strongly opinionated culture and that an LLM ban aligns well with that. ~19 opposing the proposal to some degree. (I am counting Greg K-H's comments as a very weak "oppose".) 5 specifically mentioned paying for the service, and 1 stated they will stop paying if the policy takes effect. Some stated that they don't personally use LLMs, or don't like them or the effects they have, or would support a weaker ban (e.g. only ban fully vibe-coded projects or excessive resource usage).

ahepp 1mo ago
>mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....) That is certainly one way to decide what to do with the data your customers paid you to store...

Zambyte 1mo ago

Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies. I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now. [1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ [2] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-cop...

klardotsh 1mo ago
While I am 100% with you that we've arrived at the place local GPUs can do real, good work and that it helps combat the energy arguments against certain LLM usage, Drew is not likely to agree with you. I can't find it on a quick search which tells me I'm probably remembering it from his prior Mastodon account, but I distinctly remember Drew once talking about how gaming GPUs were part of the (climate) problem and that we should all take notes from the Nintendo Switch in terms of gaming joy delivered per watt. This is not to say I disagree with Drew's desire for efficiency, even in gaming. This is simply to say: from my recollection of that blog/toot thread/whatever it was, even home LLM usage won't meet what I recall his energy bar to be, until we've got planning and orchestrator models that fit on a non-flagship phone.
- landl0rd 1mo ago
  This seems really odd given that Drew chose to write and continues to maintain Sourcehut in a language that is one to two orders of magnitude less energy-efficient than C (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642321000022 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016764232...) I wouldn't consider this particularly hypocritical for even most people opposed to computing at the gigawatt scale, but for someone who believes a 3060 is over the line it's another story.

pnikosis 1mo ago

I don't know how this can be enforced, there's a lot of room for interpretation, making projects at risk to be banned. > - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies and > Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy. So from what I understand it is OK to use AI for security reviews privately but is not cool to host a project that allows to do that? Also, what does it mean "and so on"? Like "anything we consider we don't allow at some point?"

enriquto 1mo ago

Just to add a datapoint to the discussion: as a paying customer of sourcehut I 100% support this anti-slop policy. I'd prefer if some terms were stated somewhat more precisely, but it's great as it is.

scarlet03694 1mo ago

[flagged]

robotmay 1mo ago

Sigh, frustrating for me but I guess I understand the rationale, if not the implementation. I'm retired from programming professionally and I liked using Sourcehut for my personal projects because it just got out of my way, and I could put my mostly-old open source projects up there without worrying about people trying to contribute to them thanks to the friction of the system. I do slop-code hobby projects because I'm pretty much done with programming for fun now, but they're always private and I know that my relative load is low as I don't do much different from how I would personally use it. Personally I'm in favour of blocking LLM pull requests/merge requests/patches to open source repos - the sheer volume of crap is out of this world. I saw a repo with 1.1k unmerged PRs yesterday! The code can be from an LLM but the request to merge it damn well better be written by a human. I'm not going to put effort into reviewing something someone else couldn't be bothered to even write a blurb for. But for private projects, just shove a rate limiter on the endpoints and be done with it. Lately I'm very conflicted about software development as a whole. I've always aspired to be good, both in my work and in my relationship with others in the industry. But I can't be arsed any more - the joy has gone out of software, and I just want it to be done and out of my way. And now I have to move my photography portfolio repo that has fewer commits per day than I could write by hand, because there can't be grey areas or compromise on the modern internet. I used to work for GitLab, for what it's worth (and they've gone quite far down the AI toilet), and I honestly don't think I can be arsed setting up that or anything else. I might as well just shove bare repos on my NAS and go do something I actually enjoy.

coder-pm 1mo ago

Hah, llm detection is unreliable so a ToS like that can’t be enforced that way… that change moves responsibility to contributors who will break it, what about the autocomplete, refactoring tools?

yoz-y 1mo ago

I respect their decision. I’ll move my private slop repos to a self hosted instance. I don’t think that features like tickets and mailing lists matter for vibe coded projects anyway. They are made for an audience of one.

tomsonj 1mo ago

sourcehut is too weird to live, too rare to die

kuon 1mo ago

They put goaway on mailing list archives and I cannot read them anymore. I understand they are combating bots but this is going a bit too far. LLM policy is similar, I understand the argument against large players, but we have local LLM which can help, so the policy would require more nuance.

nvarsj 1mo ago

Well I guess it’s time to move my repos and stop paying. The moralism here is ridiculous. My code is my own, sorry.