Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

blog.codeberg.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#61

Post by zajio1am »

omnimus wrote: post #25
zajio1am wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

I agree that they are fully within their rights to decide how they want to run services they provide. However, i do not think it shields such decisions from public criticism.

If they were some random corporation making business decision, everybody would have an opinion about it and express it, not just say 'it is reasonable according to majority of board/shareholders and that is only thing that matter.'

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#62

Post by rnd0 »

conartist6 wrote: post #36
croemer wrote: post #22

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 no…

I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright. For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.

Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source. How can you verify that the model you're using wasn't trained and therefore incorporates code that is not licensed for sharing. e.g. someone theoretically uploading the shared source windows kernel to github and it being added to copilot.

There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does not happen.

That's my problem with Linus's announcement regarding AI in the kernel -since the announcement I'm counting the days until we see SCO II Electric Boogaloo.

There's a lot of people with deep pockets and a deeper hatred of FOSS, and AI gives them the backdoor to take FOSS out -legally, on the grounds of province.

(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is only my speculation from a layperson's point of view)

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#63

Post by redsocksfan45 »

JohnFen wrote: post #37
grokcodec wrote: post #35

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 s…

> The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.

[dead]

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#64

Post by inigyou »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #60
croemer wrote: post #22

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 no…

Interesting that the TOS contains the justification for the rule. That isn't necessarily something I would expect to see in a TOS and leaves the door open for people to dispute the justification or argue "well that's not relevant to THIS vibe coded project". Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Li…

I get that impression too. Seems like codeberg wants to be the hub for meaningful software, not a dump for any random file that happens to technically be free software.

See also: 100MB per-user quota for repos that are not meaningful software.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#65

Post by MSFT_Edging »

arkwin wrote: post #48

[flagged]

> You are not creating software with the exact rules that I have made up in my head on how software should be made, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you and the code you make.

The funny thing about this comment is out of the gate it screams the exact reason people don't want the LLM generated code in their zone.

This reads similar to people who make prompt art getting upset that they're not taken seriously. People demand respect for something they didn't earn. Programmers who have worked hard for their knowledge don't want to listen to the person who thinks they know everything because the magical machine spit out some working code. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. They're annoying and entitled.

I'll just paste the classic Ian Malcom Jurassic Park quote.

> I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#66

Post by shevy-java »

Codeberg kind of positions itself as an alternative to github here. Granted, you can find many differences and say that github is huge, codeberg is tiny, but this is much more about momentum. People are angry about many things, including big greedy US corporations milking people or AI slop spamming them down; this frustration of people increases, which in turn helps create more competition because people will look more for alternatives. How much of that momentum shifts into real adoption is another matter, but it is an initial seed. My own use case is that ever since the orange king and his cronies seized power, I don't want my money to go into that mafia. Trump kills the little good-will reputation the USA still may have. It also does not help that recently another Epstein-buddy (Daniel Siad) "suicided" in France; we all know that the US "justice" system will never go to uncover all billionaires who participated here, yet alone put them in jail.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#67

Post by shevy-java »

tptacek wrote: post #57

This makes sense. The largest project hosted on Codeberg today is, what, Zig? Zig is also openly hostile to LLM agents. It's a a clear identity for the site: a home for projects that identify as anti-LLM. I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stanc…

I don't see the correlation here. You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig. I don't see any indicator of that.

I also don't see your points of contention - it may help to be more specific.

Last but not least, I am also not sure they are a community hub. This depends on how many people use codeberg. IMO it is still a niche right now; perhaps that will change, but right now I am not entirely certain it is a community hub per se when compared to github. But competition is good and if there are alternatives to fatso Microsoft controlling github, I am all up for that. The upcoming mandatory age sniffing will be a waterfall moment.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#68

Post by inigyou »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #31
TheChaplain wrote: post #4

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.

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…

I think those people are trying to say that if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that. Unless the point of the project is to exactly balance at 50% AI code, then you know whether you're vibecoding or regular-coding.

Their comparison was to a no-Nazis rule, not to Nazis. That comparison works. Only vibecoders argue about the intricacies of a no-vibecoding rule, just like only Nazis argue about the intricacies of a no-Nazis rule. They aren't saying vibecoders are Nazis, they're saying both vibecoders and Nazis are dishonest and try to find loopholes in the rules and accidentally identify themselves by doing that. The people who argue about age of consent also do that, which is why the person mentioned rape.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#69

Post by EdiX »

rnd0 wrote: post #62
conartist6 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright. For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.

Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source. How can you verify that the model you're using wasn't trained and therefore incorporates code that is not licensed for sharing. e.g. someone theoretically uploading the shared source windows kernel to github and it being added to copilot. There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does no…

> Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source

That's not how copyright works. If you use a pirated copy of photoshop the resulting image is not illegal.

Re: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

#70

Post by omnimus »

hamburgererror wrote: post #47

Codeberg's philosophy sounds really good, I build open source scientific research projects, would you advise me using this platform instead of Github for making my code public?

Depends if you require just public space for the project or if you also need the project to be part of social media network of Github. As "forge" Codeberg is pretty great. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.
Post reply on HN