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Comment by aliasxneo | Hacker News Reader

> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.

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.

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So it sounds like you're treating Codeberg as a neutral git host. They've made it clear they don't want to be that, they are a charity association that supports free software development by providing free software developers with services like git hosting. They are not wasting their services on people who don't align with the mission.

That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed.

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.

> That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated?

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.

Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

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.

> Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

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.

Your logic is sound.

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.

Have you considered actually asking someone at Codeberg about your cryptography project?

Is this the "contact our sales team for pricing" of open source?

no this is the "we are real people, not a faceless algorithm" of open source.

Who would one ask to get an official and enforceable answer?

I don’t want an opinion, I need a definitive ruling I can trust.

It's not like they don't have a contact page: https://docs.codeberg.org/contact/

> 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?

Hosting a project with its issues, packages, releases, discussions and everything is an investment. The URLs will be in multiple places, some of which I don't control.

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

Ok then do that. They're not asking for your business. They lose money on it.

>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).

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...

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