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.
Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.
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?
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
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.
Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.
I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands.
No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.
"No company is going to jail for you."
If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t want an opinion, I need a definitive ruling I can trust.
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...
I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote:
> The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).
But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.
Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.
And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.
(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
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.
Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?
In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.
4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
1. dang specifically posted a comment saying the rule has been around for _years_ [1]
2. I browsed the top upvoted comments and they seem to almost universally lean towards this being a good thing.
That's about what I would of expected. Although the "being around for years" thing was news to me and doesn't really make the OP's argument a good comparison for Codeberg's case.
2. Slippery slope fallacy.
3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2
I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.
As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?
So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done.
An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.
Now you can have a perfectly legal GPL-licensed project that's not welcome because of the category it finds into or because of its devs' tooling. It's their site and their rules, sure, fine, but it does mean I'm not going to host my policy-compliant projects there. Are they going to get banned next month? Who knows.
The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:
If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.
[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-a...
I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so hard to show a little understanding and compassion.
I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue
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.
Personal use cases are now “might go unnoticed” and therefore not encouraged. Jeff’s dotfiles repo will probably never have a community, so it’s technically against the rules for some future cleanup initiative.
Most of my repos are random personal projects that are not supporting any larger open source thing, so I couldn’t look at (or recommend Codeberg) as a GitHub alternative for anything but an established project.
I think that’s all an acceptable choice, but it’s not being discussed much.
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.
There were decades of software written before modern LLMs, and a lot of people choose to hand write their software as a form of maintaining their skill. Just like people practice martial arts even though we have guns.
If you reflect on your words, you might see another side to this.
The whole point of martial arts is the art itself.
The point of software isn't the process of creating software (it was never about that), it's the end result, and all people care about is that the end result is good. And if you don't like that, you can choose another industry.
Just because you think that, it does not make it so.
And the differing perspectives on that do at least in part explain a lot of the conflict here.
Personally, I think "AI" use in art is an abhorrent thing that warrants a highly negative response. And when I was younger and even more pretentious than I am now, I often thought my code as some kind of "art." So I can stretch my mind to see how people who see things that way would have that same gut reaction.
But many like you only see the point as being the end result, so to them this all looks like pointless theatre.
One of the many dramatic things the "AI" tooling has done is to make all these divisions in perspective more obvious and more dramatic.
2. Gets mad that people he doesn't like DARE to sign up and use it
3. Announces that he won't allow people he doesn't like
4. Makes a big deal out of it like anyone cares
I dunno this is hilarious but pretty sad, the guy clearly has issues
That blog post while on the LLM topic also started throwing the OSS bathwater out and went straight-on leech mode in between the lines.