Since the blog post doesn't actually include the change to the TOS and only links to it at the very end, here it is:
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.
Not platforming your slop is the same as killing minorities? Okay...
Codeberg is not a state. This is not life and death. If you have any disagreements, feel free to join another community. The network effect hadn't kicked in yet, you're free to compete in the marketplace of ideas.
I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements.
I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912"You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look.""Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
As is pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments...
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
Not being a US citizen* means I cannot vote in US elections, thus it is a closed door vote by your reckoning and so the US is not democratic. Did I get that right?
*This is shorthand for me not being associated with the US in any way, but you are of course free to reply with all the edge cases that makes the point impossible to state briefly.
He 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.
I was applauding SiempreViernes. He found an elegant way to call someone out for doing that, before they did it, because he's played internet before and knew what the next move was.
“closed door” is a bit disingenuous considering any private individual codeberg user can apply to become an active voting member https://join.codeberg.org/
Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them.
Really? You've read their minds and have determined that this is what they're actually thinking?
> We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries.
People doing this before LLMs wasn't a problem, for some reason.
> Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
If you want traction, you need to plan out your optimal territory. Not everyone does this well.
> We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Then kick people off. Alienate them so that they go with less judgmental hosting.
> The training and deployment of LLMs has drastically raised the cost of buying hardware, in particular for SSDs and memory. it is money that we can not spend elsewhere to improve our service and foster the mission of Codeberg.
Tough. You knew that you'd be affected by market changes when you went in on this venture. Don't go crying about it now.
> These price hikes also lead to a growing digital divide: Small and even large operators are endangered by rising costs, while only the largest cloud companies have reliable agreements for hardware.
Yes, because the few producers of said hardware decided to follow the money. And guess what? They left the fertile ground of their previous market behind, ripe for new competitors to move in (and they're already starting). This is the market at work.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer ...
This is the primary reason to avoid these guys. Activist vendors are among the most dangerous because of their capriciousness. Especially when they start railing against the market they operate in.
I wonder how this turns out longer-term. Obviously more and more software development is moving to LLMs. But depending on how principled codeberg ends up about enforcing this, a project being on codeberg might end up as a strong signal that the project is not ai-slop (either made by hand, or at least by humans who care about the project)
A hub of mostly human written software would be enough. It remains to be seen whether that results in measurably better quality code over the long term.
Think about all the random git repos you've probably created for little scripts. Codeberg doesn't want to be a dumping ground for those. It wants to be a hub for software that actually matters, at least a little bit.
> 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
Huzzah! This is excellent news. Safe spaces and healthy communities are borne from enforcing strict moderation to keep the bad actors out. This is an important step forward for the platform.
> Civic infrastructure, its users, and the environment suffer
Larp detected. Also, is GitHub really so bad? I don't use any of the fancy features, I just push and pull code from it and it's basically never down for that. And if Github ultimately does die I can just point my repos at a new server and hit `git push`.
Since the blog post doesn't actually include the change to the TOS and only links to it at the very end, here it is:
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.
+1. Membership is open. The vote was given to members.
This is all reasonable.
I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.
The fact that decision was democratic is independent from whether it is good and reasonable.
Anti-homosexuality laws were also voted on democratically.
It's safe to say it's reasonable to majority of codeberg members. It doesn't really matter if it seems unreasonable from the outside.
You wouldn't say that about the above example.
Especially given several Global South countries see it as an example of foreign interference.
Strawman argument.
Not platforming your slop is the same as killing minorities? Okay...
Codeberg is not a state. This is not life and death. If you have any disagreements, feel free to join another community. The network effect hadn't kicked in yet, you're free to compete in the marketplace of ideas.
I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://scholar.social/@silvermoon82@wandering.shop/11696402... "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
As is pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments...
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
lol closed door voting is not democratic.
Not being a US citizen* means I cannot vote in US elections, thus it is a closed door vote by your reckoning and so the US is not democratic. Did I get that right?
*This is shorthand for me not being associated with the US in any way, but you are of course free to reply with all the edge cases that makes the point impossible to state briefly.
Always attack the analogy, never the argument.
I see you've played "internet" before...
He 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.
I was applauding SiempreViernes. He found an elegant way to call someone out for doing that, before they did it, because he's played internet before and knew what the next move was.
screwed words I obviously up did.
Who do you think should be voting if not their active users?
Active members* ("mere" users can't vote).
But yeah, if you care about the project and want to participate in it (including having a say), you can become an active member.
https://join.codeberg.org/
It is still democratic, what would be you preferred way to do it?
“closed door” is a bit disingenuous considering any private individual codeberg user can apply to become an active voting member https://join.codeberg.org/
Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them.
Really? You've read their minds and have determined that this is what they're actually thinking?
> We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries.
People doing this before LLMs wasn't a problem, for some reason.
> Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
If you want traction, you need to plan out your optimal territory. Not everyone does this well.
> We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Then kick people off. Alienate them so that they go with less judgmental hosting.
> The training and deployment of LLMs has drastically raised the cost of buying hardware, in particular for SSDs and memory. it is money that we can not spend elsewhere to improve our service and foster the mission of Codeberg.
Tough. You knew that you'd be affected by market changes when you went in on this venture. Don't go crying about it now.
> These price hikes also lead to a growing digital divide: Small and even large operators are endangered by rising costs, while only the largest cloud companies have reliable agreements for hardware.
Yes, because the few producers of said hardware decided to follow the money. And guess what? They left the fertile ground of their previous market behind, ripe for new competitors to move in (and they're already starting). This is the market at work.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer ...
This is the primary reason to avoid these guys. Activist vendors are among the most dangerous because of their capriciousness. Especially when they start railing against the market they operate in.
I wonder how this turns out longer-term. Obviously more and more software development is moving to LLMs. But depending on how principled codeberg ends up about enforcing this, a project being on codeberg might end up as a strong signal that the project is not ai-slop (either made by hand, or at least by humans who care about the project)
I think that's what Codeberg wants. It wants to be the hub of good software, not the dumping ground for random code files that GitHub turned into.
A hub of mostly human written software would be enough. It remains to be seen whether that results in measurably better quality code over the long term.
Think about all the random git repos you've probably created for little scripts. Codeberg doesn't want to be a dumping ground for those. It wants to be a hub for software that actually matters, at least a little bit.
thanks for addressing the source of the problems as `LLMs` and not AI in general.
> 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
I suspect that in reality it is not.
Kudos to them and others who take a principled stance against LLM crapola.
Huzzah! This is excellent news. Safe spaces and healthy communities are borne from enforcing strict moderation to keep the bad actors out. This is an important step forward for the platform.
The article literally says they intend to selectively enforce this rule and not be strict with it?
> Civic infrastructure, its users, and the environment suffer
Larp detected. Also, is GitHub really so bad? I don't use any of the fancy features, I just push and pull code from it and it's basically never down for that. And if Github ultimately does die I can just point my repos at a new server and hit `git push`.