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I regret migrating to Codeberg

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Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#11

Post by lioeters »

> LLM-generated code, or is cryptocurrency-related

Codeberg is making decisions to better manage their resource and infrastructure. It's no different than any other privately owned platform, making decisions to forbid certain kinds of content, or ban people for various reasons. Unlike other large centralized platforms, they at least tried to involve the community in this decision-making process, but in the end it's their call.

If you don't want to be under the mercy of someone else's decisions, you have to become more independent and host it yourself. Even then, who owns your server? Who owns the "pipes" of the network? They have terms of services, and can also ban you for various reasons, including your nationality, beliefs, etc. This line of thinking leads to a bigger question of how/whether a truly decentralized and free (as in freedom) computing and communication network is possible, how such a network can defend against abuse and malicious actors without compromising that freedom.

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#12

Post by boramalper »

lardosaurusrex wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned

This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0]

> 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).

The only ambiguous part is what "mostly" means in practice, but otherwise the Terms of Use is pretty clear. I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive and tries to clarify things but it's all just one very unnecessary drama [2].

[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

[2] The proposal for this change was called "ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions" so you can tell that some people are very opinionated on this.

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#13

Post by serious_angel » 

    > The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:

    > > Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
---

This naive "rapid pace"...

Those who do in that careless "pace" will invest more time maintaining it, fixing it, supporting it, or well... realizing it, I believe.

Not to mention that they make themselves more and more dependent on some LLM vendor prospering these vendors with each iteration and tokens burned, and training their models on your own ideas, creativity, and your time of life. Yet, not a single person will guarantee a stable outcome, and no one to blame after. Is that "development"? That is dark horrific sorrow.

This "vibe coding" may be quick at starters, if lucky and all Gods and the Fortune got you, yet supporting that and investing your life time after?

No, never. I have my own mind to train. The people I work with have their own minds. The Communities out there have their own minds. We all have our mind to develop, and learn from each other. Otherwise, it’s empty, pointless, and not art you will be proud of as a developer who inscribes moments in the history, and stand your name in it.

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#14

Post by pbronez »

This prompted me to revisit my own decision to avoid Codeberg by re-reading their Terms of Use[1]. A few things stand out:

   - They explicitly require all hosted software to have a FLOSS license

   - Private repos are only allowed in support of Public FLOSS repos, with a scary ambiguous note about "really small and personal stuff"

   - Projects with heavy use of coding AI are explicitly forbidden
This means I can't use Codeberg for personal projects that aren't intended for public consumption, especially if I used Claude Code to whip them up. Oh well, this is why I self-host Forgejo.

For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:

> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.

> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.

> 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).

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#15

Post by lardosaurusrex »

boramalper wrote: post #12
lardosaurusrex wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0] > 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…

[flagged]

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#16

Post by Aachen »

I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal had a short presentation and a few minutes of Q&A.

It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue.

It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"

Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#18

Post by vintagedave »

The most insightful part is:

> [From CodeBerg] It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.

> This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows

Yes! And LLMs can be valuable to solo devs!

> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did...

I agree this is troubling.

There's a lot of LLM dislike that verges into a potentially problematic ideology. I know: how a tool is used, not the tool itself, etc, but I'm unsure that that kind of approach is visible to CodeBerg. I write open source, and closed source, and I am a responsible developer who uses AI and gets more done, better. I wish I was welcome there.

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#19

Post by FireInsight »

> Despite not owning a single project that falls into either banned category, I’m now going to look into setting up my own public Git host

That's.. good, actually. I believe that even if Codeberg was good and perfect for every use case of code hosting, not every one and every project should be there. Vibe-coders, shitcoin cryptomaxis, and lovers of total freedom surely have other places to go and are able to set up forges using the same software that Codeberg uses as well. It's the magic of open source.

Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet. GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, sure, they might have been better back in the day, but being _the_ places for a type of content online they were able to privatize a lot of very valuable data, sell it off for AI training, while slowly strangling to death any interoperability and "public access" that once made the services feel like a free-for-all market square of the internet. Long live the small web!

Codeberg is not in any way obligated to make sweeping infrastructure changes just to make sure that they can keep hosting projects they find to be against their mission.

Re: I regret migrating to Codeberg

#20

Post by vintagedave »

Aachen wrote: post #16

I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal had a short presentation and a few minutes of Q&A. It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and…

Troubling, though I see it's a typical internet half-off-topic discussion. What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?
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