Codeberg Divides
lucumr.pocoo.org
lucumr.pocoo.org
The fact that the rule is open for interpretation means that they can effectively shut down malicious actors (i.e those who intentionally misrepresent the degree of AI assistance in writing their code) before they become a problem. It becomes an exercise in judgement instead of a potentially exploitable/loophole-able set of hard and fast rules.
There's no issue with this. This isn't the supreme court. Your income is not on the line. It's a code hosting repository. Go to GitHub if it bothers you.
Only time will tell if this set of values holds up. Personally, I think they will, and that the rules will end up being less strict than people are making them out to be, and that relatively few projects will be removed from the platform.
Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable?
Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules?
If not one of the two, what is the reason?
The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.
"No company is going to jail for you."
If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.
Are you arguing a Codeberg member had a legitimate fear of being jailed for hosting others’ AI code? And GitHub/all other hosters should have the same legitimate fear of being jailed a long as they don’t ban the same? Or is this more of a straw man? Or were you bringing up that quote to point out that those trying to defend Codeberg are using completely fabricated arguments?
I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands.
No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.
Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened.
This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.
And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be.
Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.
I started with a hypothetical. Then I used an actual real-world example. I have 100+ repos on GitHub spanning a wide array of technologies. If I moved all 100+ over, how do I know I won't fall afoul of whatever the community votes to ban next?
The point is Codeberg isn't a good fit for my situation which needs more continuity and less surprises, and that's been made readily apparent now. So I'm leaving, just like many other people who have been posting about it.
If the reason is more emotional than rational ("this feels like it's going to change more"), that's okay. Not everything needs to be governed by rigid rules. The Codeberg community knows that well. If in a few years your 100+ repos are still all fine and dandy to their rule set I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.
Unfortunately you can't make that decision. I have to wait and find out how far the ToS violation will be implemented. Or I just avoid that stress and go somewhere else. Most people being affected seem to be choosing the latter.
> If the reason is more emotional than rational
That's a bit reductive. Risk management always has a level of uncertainty involved. No one makes decisions with 100% certainty in the outcome. Before these votes, I had a certain level of risk assessment in moving off Github To Codeberg that favored Codeberg. Now that situation has changed. It's not "emotional" to recognize that.
The GP aimed to paint you as a fool because he apparently identifies with Codeberg and is unhappy that you’ve raised an objection he can’t easily dismiss.
I don’t want an opinion, I need a definitive ruling I can trust.
> I need a definitive ruling I can trust
Why? What's so special about the place where you host your source? It's the second time I see this sentiment in the thread, and I don't get it. If an official channel tells you a project is OK, and then someone else decides it's not, what does it really happen outside of you taking your project elsewhere?
Then suddenly the hoster decides that my project isn't wanted because the zeitgeist is against some technology used in it and poof it goes away.
What now?
"Just move away", sure. I can do that if they still let me export my data. But to be honest I'd rather just use a platform with a smaller risk of getting booted because someone decided my project is "too AI" or something similar.
I have no idea if there's a way to argue against the decisions, what proof do I need to provide, do I need to prepare somehow? Like have video of myself with a dated newspaper typing the code by hand to prove AI wasn't used? :D
Looking at community conversations, there actually seems to be little clarity over this, and quite a bit of confusion. Several established members of the community seem to be saying that the ToS actually only bans "cryptocurrency related projects" that "[harm] the reputation of Codeberg", and that direct cryptocurrency projects that don't harm Codeberg's reputation are actually allowed, saying that the current banner is a mistake and is in the process of being changed (while they have their own systems and are not on Codeberg, I'm guessing GNU Taler might be an example of a cryptocurrency project that would be allowed). In fact, this appears to be within the official interpretation used when locking the discussion thread on the change ([1] refers to [2]).
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19... [2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).
But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.
Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.
And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.
(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote:
> The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.
I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.
As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?
So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done.
An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.
The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:
If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.
[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-a...
I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so hard to show a little understanding and compassion.
I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue
Now you can have a perfectly legal GPL-licensed project that's not welcome because of the category it finds into or because of its devs' tooling. It's their site and their rules, sure, fine, but it does mean I'm not going to host my policy-compliant projects there. Are they going to get banned next month? Who knows.
4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
1. dang specifically posted a comment saying the rule has been around for _years_ [1]
2. I browsed the top upvoted comments and they seem to almost universally lean towards this being a good thing.
That's about what I would of expected. Although the "being around for years" thing was news to me and doesn't really make the OP's argument a good comparison for Codeberg's case.
2. Slippery slope fallacy.
3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2
This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.
Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?
In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.
No one is disputing the existence of the question.
> In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later.
Okay, so then, what actually is the banning process? The recent changes sound like the banning process has been expanded to cover a lot of new things that it didn't before, and stating "well anyone can ban you" isn't particularly helpful information, which was the point I was making.
This is the actual part of the TOS
Please be aware that this list is neither exhaustive nor complete (illustrating the spirit of the law, not its letter). Be aware that any account can get suspended at any time if it is used for activities harming Codeberg e.V. or its associated platform and services, directly or indirectly, even if these activities are not explicitly listed in the examples above.
So your best bets is to keep backups of your data soemwhere else. Which you should always be doing.
Generally backing up a git repo is easy; it's all of the other stuff that tends to get hosted together with the code (issue tracking, pull requests, releases, potentially even CI) that's a lot worse to have to migrate over. Plus, anywhere a link was published to the repo is going to point to something that no longer exists.
It actually sounds like we're in agreement for the most part about the relative levels of risk here. I misunderstood your earlier reply to me as a rebuttal to what I was saying to the parent commenter, but from re-reading it I'm realizing I might have inferred incorrectly.
> it's all of the other stuff that tends to get hosted together with the code (issue tracking, pull requests, releases, potentially even CI) that's a lot worse to have to migrate over. Plus, anywhere a link was published to the repo is going to point to something that no longer exists.
I think most of them provides API endpoint to access those data or some export tools. And as far as links go, I would prefer to have a webpage for any relevant projects, something like the one for msmtp [0], tied to my own domain.
Too many people are afraid to offend and waste everyone's time going along with things they don't really agree with and end up pretending to be somebody they're not to get along with people they don't really like.
No! Get your most polarizing takes out quickly. Either you and the other person stop wasting time because there's no fit, or you will deepen the relationship and both know it's a good fit. Either way, it's better for everyone involved.
There's enough people out in this big world that you don't need to always make everyone happy. It's much better to quickly comb through to find the gems.
Removing the obvious rule breakers looks like an easy win at first. Then over time the list of rules grows. Small groups become good at navigating the rule making process and getting changes pushed through. Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors. The community was long since cleared out from anyone who got sick of the drama, leaving a weird internal battle where different in groups are fighting with each other over little things and turning the rules against each other.
Maybe Codeberg will be different. Maybe the rule making stops here and it’s reasonably enforced against only the really bad examples, with leeway granted to others generously. Maybe it doesn’t turn into a slippery slope of little dramas that exhaust everyone who isn’t invested in the constant background drama of their code hosting site. I hope it does for their sake.
But I also think enough people like me have seen what happens to communities that go down the path of generating a lot of rules like these and will choose to steer clear of this site. It always feels like a good idea when you and all your friends are on the right side of the rules, but it’s less fun when you find yourself making choices or tip toeing around to avoid triggering the Nth round of rules that were introduced 10 steps past where you thought the rules were in a good and balanced place.
Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.
> 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/71149c7fc95ccfeae36...
When instead you state higher level values and ask for cooperation, it encourages us to work together. It's the Honor System instead of a deliberate competition between rule makers and everyone else.
Concrete example: sports
When you are playing with a group of friends and there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part because we all love the game and want to have a good time.
Once you introduce referees, the game within the game of "what can I get away with?" starts and you end up with players learning how to foul without getting caught and then players overreacting to fouls in order to make sure the rule breakers still get caught, and then it evolves into flopping to get a foul called even when there was none, and eventually people start to hate the sport altogether (see: NBA, FIFA)
Concrete example: government and police forces. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?
I had a whole long conversation about this with another commenter a while ago if you're interested in learning more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697
India has a different system where generally speaking, it behaves more like UK/US courts (common law) over civil law.
But if Supreme Court reads fundamental rights are violated then Supreme Court can read the constitution in a similar way but Supreme Court has used it sometimes to force the government hands.
For example, when the Bhopal Gas tragedy happened where people died because of the accident (Rest in peace), instead of having individual people try to sue the govt. and fight for years with no end in sight, the supreme court used article 142 to impose single lump sum settlement and centralized compensation scheme. So it can force a govt to do something.
The Sahara-SEBI Case is even more direct when supreme court forced a company to refund amount and fast-tracked it in a more civil-law style case.
But Indian Supreme court is very slow and from my understanding, does try to use it rarely and only the Indian Supreme court can invoke article 142 and its more so done to prevent genuine gaps rather than already existing provisions
I found this whole discussion really interesting
In theory this split between common law and civil law is about who you trust more: judiciary or legislature. Civil law leaves more to interpretation for judiciary whereas common law leaves very little to interpretation. There doesn't seem to be very wide consensus on which system is necessarily better to be honest.
Only in small groups. Any sufficiently large groups will have a number of people (possibly sociopaths) that will break the rules for personal gain. And in a lot of cases it's enough if very few people do that.
Codeberg is best known as a place for people to go when they're fed up with GitHub. People who are fine with GitHub's various issues wouldn't be looking at Codeberg in the first place, as far as I can tell.
There is GitLab, though. And Forgejo and a bunch of others.
Personal use cases are now “might go unnoticed” and therefore not encouraged. Jeff’s dotfiles repo will probably never have a community, so it’s technically against the rules for some future cleanup initiative.
Most of my repos are random personal projects that are not supporting any larger open source thing, so I couldn’t look at (or recommend Codeberg) as a GitHub alternative for anything but an established project.
I think that’s all an acceptable choice, but it’s not being discussed much.
This also mean that some kind of charismatic leader can become a de-facto tyrant.
And btw, lone leader on top, bending the rules at will… that’s a trait all dictatorships have in common (hitler, mussolini, stalin, mao, etc). Just saying.
Reminds me of internal political disagreements.
> The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
As I understand it, they do not ban Crypto. Crypto is just an example for a category of projects that harm there reputation. The formulation for AI generated code is different. It does not point out AI / LLMs as example for copyright issues. It does it the other way around.
Platforms that are known for making moral judgments will likely keep making moral judgments in the future. Eventually, they'll make a judgment that you heavily disagree with.
This is why communities founded on ideology tend to shatter, while those founded on a shared goal tend to survive. Linus doesn't care whether you're a GPU expert at AMD, a 16-year-old in Nairobi, or a nazi with a swastika tattooed on your arm. He cares about the quality of your kernel patches.
It's at best neutral, and at worst considered to be immoral.
Nobody says "I need to make a billion dollars because of my morals".
> As to sending me a revert patch — please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be ‘supporting’ Russian aggression?
(from https://therecord.media/linus-torvalds-russian-linux-kernel-...)
I think this shows that there is a blurry line between moral and practical judgment, and that the type of judgment might not even matter in the way you think. Sure, this episode may have been started by OFAC sanctioning various Russian companies, but Linus is happy to invoke more personal moral terms; and ultimately whether it's practical or moral doesn't matter, a bunch of Russian folks found themselves without a commit bit seemingly at random and the same could happen to anyone regardless of a particular platform's or company's judgment.
(and of course Linus cares, like any unaccountable asshole he can be triggered by a way more trivial thing than a swastika (see the side comment for an example)
"The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
Amended to include at the end ", as long as you use the tools we find agreeable."
[1]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/
I do have an issue with their "tainted code" project that labels various FLOSS projects as "AI tainted".
ardour.org has the follow AI policy statement:
---------
Using LLMs to generate code for Ardour
A word about licensing, copyright and LLMs ("AI"). We require all code contributed to Ardour to be licensed under the GPL (you may retain copyright, but the code must use the GPL). Currently, following Thaler vs. Perlmutter in March 2025, no LLM-generated code may be copyrighted in the USA. The GPL relies on copyright, and cannot function if copyright is not held. Consequently, if you use an LLM (Claude, Codex, CoPilot etc. etc) to create code, it cannot be included in Ardour.
If you want to use LLMs to explore and understand some of Ardour's source code, feel free. But we cannot accept PRs or patches or contributions that are not licensed under the GPL, and if you choose to be honest about it, this means that no LLM-generated code can be accepted by us.
---------
Yet this codeberg-adjacent project considers this project to be AI-tainted. If you're going to do something, do it right or don't do it at all.
Their decision leans too heavily on what that court decision said. It was actually fairly nuanced.
The court explicitly declined to address whether Thaler could be considered the author because he created the AI, because Thaler originally listed the machine as the sole author in his registration application.
It is clear that works generated entirely by AI without meaningful human contribution are not eligible for copyright protection, though it does not resolve questions regarding AI-assisted works where human input is significant, which is a predominant use case with AI-assisted coding.
Finally, it appears they're unfamiliar with copyright rules around non-copyrightable works that are combined with other creative copyrightable works. The result is almost universally copyrightable. I'm hedging because I haven't thought through the cases exhaustively, but I can't think of a single case where the resulting work would not be copyrightable.
And therefore is not licensable under the GPL; because no license is needed at all. Ardour's goal isn't to be "compatible with" the GPL (in the sense of allowing binaries to be built containing both GPL-licensed code and their own code); their goal is to be covered by the GPL license for the purpose of constraining what actions users can take. This requires the code to be copyrighted, because copyright law is the mechanism that allows them to require users to agree to a license.
That is true for public domain code.
It is not true (at this time) for machine generated code.
Anyway, that case did not establish that code written with an agent cannot be copyrighted by the human operating the agent. The whole problem is that the application was submitted listing the AI as sole author, so the court did not consider whether the operator could have listed himself as the author. And if he had no one would have had standing to dispute it.
I think we will be seeing a lot more of this. There were plenty of examples of developers failing to understand copyright law and the implications of licenses before LLMs and that was with well established law. With some genuine uncertainty around LLMs, more variation between jurisdictions and some criteria that are less clear its going to get a lot worse.
> The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
It is way too arbitrary and open to interpretation and biases.
They are not trying to retain you as a customer or even have customers ! They do not advertise ...! I am a [relatively responsible] utilisateur of AI and I truly do not understand the entitlement of some people.
It is a nonprofit, the vast majority of people complaining are not voters, donators, or members, while the vast majority of nonprofit members have chosen this view.
My personal opinion, is that the people clutching pearls are _scared_. There is a nagging feeling that deep down, they know the machine gods they love so dearly are _wrong_.
That if actions like these pick up momentum, if their "experiments" work, and more and more people start realizing that alternatives exist, the current places will end up as mostly "dead malls" as the people have moved on to the new places. And they will be facing at a gate where the people guarding it know where they came from, and why they are now asking for entry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs (blog.codeberg.org) 1 day ago, 144 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 Codeberg bans vibe coded projects (codeberg.org/codeberg) 2 days ago, 279 comments
Ah, the Codeberg Drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034928 - July 2026 (51 comments)
I regret migrating to Codeberg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021856 - July 2026 (474 comments)
Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 - July 2026 (144 comments)
Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015588 - July 2026 (638 comments)
Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465 - July 2026 (77 comments)
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 - July 2026 (279 comments)
Want to use other tools? Move somewhere else.
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015588
Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635
I regret migrating to Codeberg
Bluesky, from my daily use, seems like it’s thriving and full of varied and interesting people.
I find great that there are places that are still human first and sensible about community and free software instead of just providing technical infra. Gitlab and Gitea are already open Github alternatives: open source core projects turned open sourcish business with free as in beer plans that get monetized with user data, loss leadering, business offerings and other sassy business models. Codeberg is deciding to not be that. Other projects can decide different and its users should evaluate the tradeoffs and choose.
Edit: Found it, but it wasn't obvious the navigation path to it. Would be nice if "free tier" on their home page was a link where it was there and clear.
This feels like a strange statement. Unless you are going out of you way to disguise AI contributions it's extremely simple to do some git magic to get an exact percentage. But you can also just ask AI and it'll tell you directly. And even if you've tried to disguise it I'm fairly certain that if you set aside 10$ for tokens, it'll be able to deduce how much is AI even with someone having tried to disguise it.
Wrong category. It doesn't want to. It's not a company. Might as well act on their beliefs.
Devs are so spoiled with free CI, running nonsensical workflows all the time for free. Imagine that multiplied by magnitudes thanks to AI. Just a waste of resources.
Github allows private repos, organization access control etc. I don't see how Codeberg is competition.
GitHub for all its purposes remains a platform hostile to EU interests long term.
Are there any alternatives that you could use for closed source development that aren't owned by US entities?
What if you can't be bothered and would rather pay a symbolic subscription, like what github offers?
And then they wonder why they go bankrupt like those dignified German car manufacturers. It's because people can't afford them.
Is "vibe-coded software" really going to be the "Open Source software of tomorrow"? The opinion stated in the blog post announcing this change is the opposite:
"We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole." and this is expanded in more detail later in that blog post (starting at the "Collaboration at danger" section).
This reeks of the same FOMO strategy seen often in cryptocurrency projects (which, unsurprisingly, have also been banned from Codeberg at the same time): stating that their way is going to be the future, and that those who don't follow it will be left behind ("have fun staying poor").
No. They don't. This isn't a "you just have to deal". You can say no. It's OK to decide that it's not worth the smaller amount of positives to deal with the massive amount of negatives. If you disagree, start your own community.
Are there any projects on codeberg that are getting banned and actually have significant human interest?
If codeberg decided to kick out spammers, nobody would decry the loss, so what's being lost here? Is it strictly slippery slope?
The judgement you're talking about here ("banned projects don't have human users propostionate...") is going to require evidence? At this point the software community is absolutely full of these tools and people who use them.
If the specific thing banned was projects like that, fine. But that's not what the clause added in the PR said.
That is self-evident.
> and people who use them.
This isn’t.
I have my own remotes with my own CI and it’s all ultrafast because I can just make assumptions about the way I write software.
None of these platforms are necessary for development. Just take from them what you want and build your own universe. This grade of CRUD software is generally solved.
There are places you need other people. Stuff like ffmpeg or GPU kernels. But other kinds of code is kind of unimportant. Not being part of this community loses you nothing.
First:
> 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).
Second:
> - Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects.
[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
And maybe a statement that: Pre-existing clearly "vibe coded" projects providing little value to the community may be subject to review. Our resources are limited. Don't abuse them.
Instead it got framed in moralistic terms in many places, the actual voting process actively resisted all calls for clarification ("if you're a vibe coder you'll know, so stop trying to ask for clarification", the tone in online forums became nasty, and the result is both ambiguous and culturally poisoned and I decided to move my project ("good riddance!" call out the victors, "we got one of them!")
I do think the one substantial argument that was made through the threads, was around IP ownership laws. However I remain unconvinced.
Frankly if there's anywhere where I would most like to see AI generated work -- which is frankly based on weights generated from the broad and indiscriminate harvesting of other people's works -- is in copylefted software that takes the distillations of the efforts of the community and makes it available as free software with free software protections.
I understand not everyone shares that opinion, and they're welcome to different interpretations.
Like the author of the article I'm saddened to see this split. I am honestly curious to see where we are in 2-3 years on this topic.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. We have large corporations stealing work left right and center. Lets utilise that to our benefit and make open and free versions of all software. The crux is that to do that each individual has to pay currency to use this tool. Maybe there is a place for collectives to collect money and to utilise llms to free software. (What strange times we live in.)
A slight aside, open source lived and breathed the idea of ownership of software, be that a council, a handful of committed maintainers, a BDFL and all things in between and adjacent. There isn't really much wrong with "vibe coded" software, the issue seems to be owning that software. Things feels fundamentally more fluid, based on specs and more importantly tests that actually define the features that the software is expected to perform. Not ownership, but more like a contract.
The author talks a lot about what they want from Codeberg. And I suppose it's fine to wish someone (on the right side of the ocean) would provide services, tailored to your personal desires, for free. But don't be surprised when no one takes you up on it.
For myself, I don't see a point to Codeberg simply being a clone of GitHub. GitHub is free, which is great, but it's also pretty shitty. Why do we need more of that?
The only people dividing and ruining open source are those paid for it by AI companies. Sometimes indirectly, like NumPy through its various sponsors. Then suddenly a bureaucrat appears on a mailing list or elsewhere and announces that AI contributions need to be allowed.
> the main property I need from infrastructure [is for] it to be predictable, dependable, and reasonably neutral towards the legal Open Source software hosted on it.
I do not like to build on a foundation that could be ripped away from under my feet at any moment for arbitrary reasons.
Do you only build and publish software in a vacuum running on hardware you own? There is no online community in the western hemisphere that isn't subject to any kind of arbitrariness, be it internal (community, like here) or external (legal or infrastructurally, like on github).
This first sentence is such a weasel-acknowledgement that is used to just effectively ignore all of it.
It’s also got a great ci/ci experience.
For those of us who are tired of AI messing with things, stop complaining and let this be. Codeberg made a great decision for those who are just tired and over AI coding unnecessarily taking over everything.
How ironic. Why is the burden of labor on the open source community? They have to do more volunteer work for your AI satisfaction, even after training the very models you depend on? I think proponents of AI are the ones who have the burden of figuring out how to engage with the open source community. Use your own tokens to figure it out. Surely AI is up to the task. Your frontier models have the entirety of human diplomacy at its fingertips to steer you towards the path of success. I wish you luck.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/06/about-1-i...
This is just for professional jobs (and is 9 months old) of course.
As long as AI is a source of environmental damage, cognitive harm, and a cause of rising hardware costs, there will always be a sizeable set of developers who want nothing to do with it. The headline should be "AI Divides".
Meanwhile, the arguments regarding environmental damage and cognitive harm are rather spurious. You can already run models like Qwen 3.6 27b on your laptop today, and it can do serious work. And the efficiency of the models only keeps improving. Meanwhile, studies showing cognitive effects you allude to have used laughably small samples, and these same types of arguments were made every time the way people work with code changed. I'm old enough to remember people screeching how you weren't a real programmer if you didn't use assembly, or that GC was ruining programming.
There's always a group of people who made a certain set of skills their whole identity who get really upset when those skill become automated. There will always be a sizeable set of current generation of developers who will want nothing to do with it, but people getting into development today will treat LLMs as a part of their regular toolkit. At the end of the day it's just a tool like any other.
If you've made your choice about LLMs based on morals or ethics rather than the quality of the tooling, you're not going to change that choice because the models haven't disappeared or have improved, unless you're forced to (but that forced bit applies only to commercial open source which really just isn't on Codeberg at all in the first place).
It has been long enough that just about everyone has made that choice by now. Those who are okay with this won't magically flip and start using LLMs and grow a reason to leave.
And no, a year is absolutely not long enough for everyone to have made a choice about this tooling. Claiming any sorts of absolutes about completely new technology that's rapidly evolving is absolutely delusional.
And in any other case I would agree with your second paragraph as well! But AI is very, excessively loud. Even if you never wanted to -- especially if you never wanted to -- you were already overexposed to it ages ago (when it was at its worst, really, but that's probably beside the point). You would have made your choices then: use now, never use, or use later if it improves. I'll grant the technicality that "everyone" is hyperbole of course, but when you have grandmas and children both talking about the thing, yeah no. You'd be hard pressed to find someone without a stance. And someone remotely interested in Codeberg not having one? Come on now.
Is it just me, or does this read rather naive?
Everyone who says stuff like this is just burying their head in the sand. That is like saying that there are serious questions about the ethics of buying sweatshop-made clothes, or driving a gas-powered car, or robbing grocery stores --- but those are becoming part of life, and so we need to "figure out how to engage with them".
That doesn't mean you have to upend your life to fight the good fight. You can say "I want a world without X, but right now I need X to live, so I do X, while maintaining an awareness of it and looking for opportunities to do less X". You can say "I want a world with some kinds of X but not others, so I do the X that I'm okay with". You can even say "I think X is ethically fine so I'll do it". But it just doesn't make sense to say "there are ethical issues with X, but those only affect how we engage with it, and have no bearing on whether we think people should need to engage with it at all".
There can't be ethical consideration of "how" without at least considering the ethics of "whether".
Way to not at all engage with any of that and just go on your merry way...
Sure, if you fail to acknowledge that the other side has valid points, it is easy to act like you're completely right and they are morons, and we all need to Kumbaya together, and forget about their views.
May I suggest a few replacements? "Plagiarize" or "excrete" are both more fitting in different ways.