Codeberg Divides (lucumr.pocoo.org)
81 points by ashdnazg 5 hours ago
free_bip 3 hours ago
I think this move by Codeberg is lowkey genius. They're trying to build a community based on a set of shared values. Those who disagree with those values are now self-selecting out of the Codeberg community, which is exactly the point of passing these kinds of resolutions.
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.
Aurornis 3 hours ago
I’ve seen so many variations of this where a community starts adding more rules that are open to judgment.
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.
kps an hour ago
>Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors.
Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.
krupan 3 hours ago
I've been thinking along these lines more and more. Trying to specify exact limits and trying to account for every possible situation when making rules just encourages people to find holes and workarounds. It creates a game, a competition between the rule makers and everyone else.
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?
vrganj 2 hours ago
That's actually how EU law works! I think it's also why US companies keep getting in trouble here, they try to loophole-lawyer like at home, but it just... doesn't work that way.
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
aliasxneo 3 hours ago
Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.
free_bip 3 hours ago
You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.
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.
johnfn 3 hours ago
aliasxneo 3 hours ago
cge 2 hours ago
kalleboo 3 hours ago
Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?
aliasxneo 3 hours ago
nmz an hour ago
1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it.
2. Slippery slope fallacy.
3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2
bastawhiz an hour ago
> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow
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.
lowsong 3 hours ago
I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.
squigz 3 hours ago
rpdillon 3 hours ago
The goal is to reduce the amount of use of the platform, and I think imposing this rule is an excellent way to do that. Not sure I'd call it genius, though. There's a fair likelihood of unintended consequences.
zahlman an hour ago
> 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.
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.
vrganj 3 hours ago
This is a lesson I learned in life: When you want to build something social (in this case a community, but it could also be a romantic relationship, a friendship...), the best thing you can do is to polarize as quickly as possible.
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.
jjouett an hour ago
Its a choice they're totally allowed to make, I just wish we'd get an updated mission statement[1]:
"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/
kay_o an hour ago
I don't understand why people are referring to Codeberg as competitors, or going to competition. They're WANTING you to go back => GitHub and consume the GitHub's resource's if you do not conform to their traditionalist nonprofit view.
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.
cesarb 14 minutes ago
> I wish Codeberg were more forward-looking here: willing to host the Open Source software of tomorrow, not only software made in the ways its community approves of today.
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").
PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago
I have no particular problem with this decision/policy on the part of 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.
rpdillon an hour ago
They didn't consult a lawyer when they wrote that. The idea that public domain code that is not copyrightable is incompatible with the GPL is simply not true. sqlite is in the public domain and not copyrightable, for example.
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.
cdrnsf 14 minutes ago
This decision is consistent with the community Codeberg has attracted of late. It's smaller, independent and takes stances that are not in line with competitors like GitHub. If you want something less reliable, at larger scale and filled with AI projects that GitHub is clearly encouraging, you should use GitHub.
kccqzy 4 hours ago
I don’t even mind forges taking a stance on AI. That’s fine. But I agree with Armin Ronacher here: banning projects that “mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools” is like the infamous Supreme Court “I know it when I see it” line. Yes of course I know a project mostly written by generative AI when I see it.
Hendrikto 3 hours ago
Exactly.
> The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
It is way too arbitrary and open to interpretation and biases.
kps 3 hours ago
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
CodesInChaos 3 hours ago
I think introducing unpredictable new prohibitions is a much bigger problem than the specific bans on cryptocurrency or AI written code. Especially when it leads to existing code becoming unavailable and doesn't just ban new contributions violating the rules.
neogodless 3 hours ago
Related:
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
dang 2 hours ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
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)
eberfreitas 6 minutes ago
> More importantly, LLMs if done and used well, should be welcome to all of us. They could be used to reclaim control and power, away from large corporations and institutions.
Is it just me, or does this read rather naive?
frangonf an hour ago
I am a heavy viber that uses a lot of resources in github now after LLMs compared with pre-LLMs for my personal projects.
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.
arjie an hour ago
There’s a lot of hue and cry over what’s just Yet Another Bulletin Board because it has a git repo attached? Just host this stuff yourself guys. It’s trivial these days.
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.
xvilka an hour ago
Maybe it will push more people and more effort into the true decentralization since the Forgejo/Codeberg federation[1] effort is way too slowly moving. Radicle[2] it is.
[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
infecto 4 hours ago
It is a bad rule. Their community and their choice but I hope we get some fresh options in the open source universe.
gladimdim an hour ago
So, i will self host all of mh gh mirrors on synology. Never liked strange us/eu "communities" with their strange values anyways
_def 3 hours ago
> It can choose to be a smaller community with a stronger political identity, but that is a different ambition from being a broad and dependable European alternative to GitHub.
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.
pelasaco 3 hours ago
Devs are so spoiled. They first tried to sell themselves as morally better than GitHub, and now the spoiled devs ban who uses AI..
krupan 3 hours ago
Spoiled with freedom of association and freedom of speech
lowsong 3 hours ago
Banning AI does make them morally better than GitHub yes.
skinfaxi 3 hours ago
ItsABytecode 3 hours ago
Codeberg going down the path of Blueskyification
minimaxir 3 hours ago
A notable surprise with Bluesky over the past few months is that the anti-AI sentiment has decreased slightly as it becomes harder to argue against impactful use cases.
himata4113 3 hours ago
At the start bluesky was actually pretty nice, but now it's just this weird bubble where disagreements don't exist and when I checked out like a month ago there was just so much damn p***.
stock_toaster 3 hours ago
codefloe[1] also runs forgejo.
jmull 22 minutes ago
It seems to me, Codeberg sees no value in AI slop and doesn't want to spend significant amounts of its limited resources hosting it.
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?
singron 3 hours ago
Is there any evidence of division? Are all the vibe-coders going to some codeberg2? One of the main complaints is that the banned projects don't have human users proportionate to their activity, so if they all go to codeberg2, then that forge would just be full of projects nobody cares about.
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?
cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago
Nobody has been banned yet, AFAIK. So nobody can answer your second paragraph question. But plenty are choosing to leave.
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.
nottorp 3 hours ago
> Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts.
Github allows private repos, organization access control etc. I don't see how Codeberg is competition.
delfinom an hour ago
Codeberg was competition for the EU, in the topic of tech-sovereignty which is a incredibly hot topic in the EU. With the US abusing it's position not only recently but years past, the EU is accelerating funding and plans to decouple from anything the US can mess with legally. Much of that sentiment has been spreading all over the EU governments and software communities.
GitHub for all its purposes remains a platform hostile to EU interests long term.
gladimdim an hour ago
So, only self hosting. Gonna mirror my github repos on my synology!
Arainach 3 hours ago
> But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made. The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not just divide into camps.
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.
Zsfe510asG 3 hours ago
I see. We should not divide into camps so the Austrians can sell their AI startups.
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.
Hendrikto 3 hours ago
Fully agree. I am against AI slop, LLM overhyping, and cryto scams, as much as anybody, however:
> 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.
jalev 3 hours ago
> 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).
nilslindemann an hour ago
Considering the fact that AI-written code is the future, Codeberg has damned itself to be a niche project forever.
TheJoYo 3 hours ago
I'd rather have a way to quickly ID what deltas were generated and which were not but that will never happen if it becomes a weapon to ban a project.
ChrisArchitect 32 minutes ago
Related:
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
ok123456 3 hours ago
So are they going to have "AI" police this? Heuristics about check-in size and scope are still AI, albeit "classical AI."
8organicbits 32 minutes ago
The low hanging fruit are claude.md, commits co-authored by Copilot, etc.
yogthos 3 hours ago
A great way to ensure that most developers will not be using Codeberg going forward. While there's a ton of drama around LLM use right now, anybody who's actually used this tech in anger understands that these tools really do work, and that they will only be used more in the future. I guess Codeberg is angling to become a small artisanal community, and there might certainly be a niche for that.
2001zhaozhao an hour ago
I write almost all code with GenAI nowadays. I'd like to say it's not slop, but I guess now there's no way to get Codeberg to agree.
philipwhiuk 37 minutes ago
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made.
This first sentence is such a weasel-acknowledgement that is used to just effectively ignore all of it.
cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago
Agree substantially here, as I said elsewhere: the honest and respectful answer from the Codeberg community would have been: add resource limits, quotas, and a reviewed application form for new projects.
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.
kakonako 2 hours ago
> 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 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.
dmitrygr 3 hours ago
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But
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.
aclindsa 3 hours ago
The way I read the article was not that the author disagrees with the concerns you mention, but instead that they believe Codeberg's recent actions fail to address these underlying concerns while adding uncertainty for users of their platform (which they fear will ultimately hurt codeberg). To me, it reads as a call for further discussion and clarification rather than a dismissal.
pelasaco 3 hours ago
It's typical Berlin. Try with virtue signaling. Get overrun by reality. Impose Censorship. But for the good <3
mariusor an hour ago
Typical hn comment: xenophobia, hyperbole, wishful thinking, missing the point, cynicism and cheap sarcasm.
You managed to hit all of them. Congrats.
ralph84 3 hours ago
That's the beauty of the internet, everyone can find their space. Even the buggy whip makers.