Right - I see the other topic has been locked / author hasn’t returned to follow community rules.
Here’s the original topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
and a measured (IMHO) response to it. (BTW, do your self a favour and change tabs with that site open :)
https://マリウス.com/i-regret-migrating-to-codeberg/
It’s a tough spot, Codeberg has found themselves in and I wish them luck. But beyond that, this is (yet) another reminder that in 2026, if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
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I like it. We need more specialization of services and less centralization. If Codeberg is the “human-made FOSS forge” then that means something when you see a project on it. If that’s not your project, fine, there is plenty of competition (and Forgejo is open source just run it yourself).
Would be cool to see someone make a “vibehub” and then you know when you see a link to a project on there what you’re getting (depending on your opinion, good or bad)
Yeah I stopped putting anything on codeberg and finished moving to sourcehut after they announced this. I’m stuck with Github due to work but policing whatever random repos I have and want source control is a bit of a dick move.
I have a local forjejo which replicates certain repos to Codeberg and others to Github. Now I have to adjust my integration.
OOTL Wasn’t there something about forgejos capabilities to federate? I had the impression, that it would go the fediverse route with many interacting instances. Then everyone can make their own rules. There are many reason to moderate repos. So why is this such a big thing (if forgejo federates as I remembered from the back of my head)?
Federation is still a work in progress IIRC.
But everyone can already selfhost their own instance if all they want is a web-facing git forge.
Being able to self host a git forge was always possible, even before forgejo. Besides the gitea controversy I thought the federation to be the real killer feature.
So I guess I have to wait a bit more for the federation.
Because Codeberg is its own charity type thing they have a cohort of users that vote on decisions made and you cannot even see how they came to that decision because that area is restricted to them. Presumably they might not federate at all.
Not federating at all would be a shame IMO. I’m really exited on this feature for git forges
Honesty, I respect Codeberg for making a decision. No matter what they choose there would be pushback
From what I understand from their blogpost, it was mostly about conserving their own resources, because a lot of the vibecoded projects they got were uploading insane amounts of binary releases and wasting resources on CI/CD while having no users or other collaborators.
They wanna reserve more server space for projects, that actually productively use it, like bigger FOSS projects with actual users and contributors.
That is perfectly understandable for me, even without taking my huge distaste for AI into consideration. Anyone that thinks, that this small, community funded project is obligated to host their huge slop repos semms pretty entitled to me.
I also think this was just about saving resources. Under the guise of licensing
Maybe not only, Codeberg have standards.
What about setting quotas? They could introduce new account validations if they wanted
They already have, for CI at least.
But why have a quota on slop?
Slop is subjective… Bad code existed forever even eons before invention of llms
We’re not talking about bad code, we’re talking about slop code. It’s different. It’s easy just to generate slop code, it is not so easy to code all by yourself.
Slop has no definition and it’s subjective… It’s crystal clear that people cannot reliably determine what LLM slop from human slop
deleted by creator
before reading the blog post I was thinking the same. now I don’t.
the worst of the LLM projects have no place on codeberg that’s for sure, but there would have been better ways than a blanket ban to limit the resource consumption of LLM and crypto projects. codeberg already has a storage quota system, they could be giving a lower quota for LLM projects, maybe also disable free CI for them, which I am a bit surprised they have given. and solve the reputation problem with banners. but no, total blanket ban based on feelings, it is.
If the hard legal reality of all LLM generated code having a high risk of breaking copyright is “feelings” for you, then sure 🙄
Not true, this does not occur frequently. This study and software LiCoEval from 2024 found 0.88% to 2.01% of code “strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations”. Afaik this is mostly textbook examples, snippets from stack overflow snippets or common github repositories, often replicated api examples and language boilerplate. How you prompt and refine also matters, and for generating novel code or business logic the LLM simply cannot use memorized snippets.
Presumably since then LLMs have worked to reduce that number of memorized code. Since LLMs cannot memorize all their training data, that number is limited. LiCoEval can find the often memorized examples and train to remove them, or suppress them, or they find other ways to reduce direct reproduction from memorization. For example it would be possible to do what malus.sh does with all the training data. Then it cannot memorize copyrighted code.
So for a model that came out 2026 this already small number might not be that relevant anymore.
Copyright can also apply to code rewritten in another programming language, if the overall structure and functionality is identical. Although tbh, that is a bit of a grey area, and in previous rulings there is some precedence that if the “translation” involves significant human effort then it can be considered to be sufficiently transformative. But promting an LLM to “rewrite this in Go” very likely doesn’t pass that relatively high bar.
The study you linked is interesting (and likely underestimates the issue*), but it also shows that it is possible to automate detection of copyright infringing code in LLM output, and even just 2% is more than enough to open a case for malicious litigation. Large companies can write that off as the cost of doing business, but for small individual open-source developers this is a significant risk.
‘*’ Because human programmers usually reuse existing licensed code as libraries, while LLMs are prone to rewrite them, and as explained above a rewrite is at an elevated risk of being considered copyright infringing.
You can also set a LLMs to completely rewriting code snippets from scratch to perform the same function, writing and fulfilling the same unit tests. Not just rewrite in a different language or changing variable names. Basically the transformative abilities of LLMs can make copyright obsolete.
Basically the transformative abilities of LLMs can make copyright obsolete.
That is wishful thinking. Copyright was originally designed to protect human creativity, and a lot of the laws and precedence cases involve human effort specifically to distinguish between plagiats and original works.
As long as courts don’t start to rule otherwise, LLM generated code is not considered to be copyrightable itself, thus it can not be original work as defined under copyright laws. This in turn lowers the threashold for such code to be considered a derivative regardless of if there is a clear pathway from one to the other. All it takes is someone to claim that it is derivative, and the burden of proof that it isn’t largly falls onto the person accused. And if the code is functionally identical and with no significant human involvement, that is very hard to proove.
IANAL of course.
There is simply no way that is true. First, the legal arguments are dodgy:
- There is a good chance that LLMs are sufficiently transformative that courts will decide they don’t infringe the copyright of their sources.
- Even if not, hosts will get DMCA-style safe harbour protection and the most they’ll be liable for is takedown requests, which is a major thing for any large host.
Second, there is no fucking way a western court is going to tell every big tech company they have to delete 99% of the code that was written since the start of the year, even if the law as written literally said verbatim, “use of any LLM output for any purpose is breach of copyright” because it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realise that it’s politically impossible.
You may not like that, but it means that, again, Codeberg is doing this based on feels.
Well I left github because of “feels”, reddit too.
I think slop-code & crypto can go there if they want, what are your “feelings” about that?
I think your feelings are irrelevant to the admins’ and don’t change the fact that they aren’t being honest (with people, or quite possibly themselves)
They are honest and say what they are doing, go make your own free git hub with crypto and LLM?
It must be so nice that you can dismiss reasoned argument about why I don’t believe they’re being honest with a plain assertion.
go make your own free git hub with crypto and LLM?
Why? It doesn’t interest me. Nothing that I’ve said suggests I would be.
You are missing the point entirely. LLMs regularly generate code that is a near verbatim copy of existing copyrighted code, but with almost no way for the LLM using person to notice that. LLMs being sufficiently transformative might be an argument about the use of training material, making the resulting model not a copyright violation itself, and thus might protect the companies that produce and offer these models, but it says nothing about the actual output of a model.
It is only a question of time before some enterprising law firm decides to mass scan open-source projects and weaponize their findings similar to patent trolls or file-sharing legal threats. This has a long history in Germany where Codeberg is located, and even if a court rules that the host itself is only responsible for removing such copyright violating code, it will require significant effort to do so with constant legal fights as the attacking lawyers will try to figure out the identity of the person responsible so that they can blackmail them with cease and desist legal fees.
Politics will not care about some hobbyist open-source projects and large companies will spend a lot of effort to obfuscate their code to prevent this legal trolling to affect them.
People can upload code that violates copyright too. No llm required.
So if that is the concern have a rule about not violating copyright (which they may already have). And there is likely already a process for handling that.
This is the problem I have with the situation: the solution chosen (banning llm code) doesn’t really address the concerns they’ve raised directly. It’s just apologetics to make it sound like it’s reason-based rather than “we don’t like it”.
It’s their platform, they can do what they want, but let’s not pretend it’s not code-puritanism.
Yes, they can upload copyrighted stuff, but people typically don’t do so on large scale and when they knowingly do it these days they typically try to hide their tracks well enough that law firms know it will not be a lucrative business to try and blackmail them.
And one of Codeberg’s main points is the unknown copyright status, you just failed to understand it.
Yeah - it’s well known that scripts to automate doing bad things did not exist before llms.
People have tried using forges to host explicitly illegal material all the time. Not just “this may be a copyright issue perhaps maybe”.
The copyright complaint is a fig leaf to hide their shame.
They also outright banned cryptocurrency code with no “copyright fig leaf” apologia.
It’s code puritanism plain and simple. “We don’t like these things so we’re banning them.”
You’re right I wasn’t really thinking about the possibility of verbatim reproduction. I guess we’ll see about that.
Codeberg will need efficient procedures to handle IP trolls anyway, getting a bunch more takedown requests ought not to make a big difference. And if somehow it does start to be a problem… that would be the time to blanket ban or take similar drastic action. If it’s possible to detect now, it will be possible to detect then.
Politics will absolutely care about having a precedent which leaves big tech exposed. Any case against little fish will be jumped on by Zuck and Bezos before you can say “datacenter”.
No, these malicious law firms intentionally go after the small fish, who are much more likely to be intimidated and give in to a settlement payment before it even reaches the courts.
And for Codeberg it makes absolutly sense to minimize the issue for them now before it becomes an even bigger issue.
k
AIs already pillaged all the code in the world. This is fighting a lost fight. We won’t manage to force big AI firms that literally props a country to stay afloat to make their AI “forget” or “untrained”.
Regulators let the pillaging happen so now AI does know how to code. They dont imitate they truly code.
But IMO the real fight is about things like malus that are the real dangerous and malevolent actor here. They will take your open source code and resell it to big businesses.
You are linking to a parody project 🤦
And you are also misunderstanding my point. Yes the cat is out of the bag and companies will absolutely copyright wash their codebases like that, but they have big legal teams to defend against copyright trolls and generally do not publish most of their code base for anyone to see.
Small hobbyist open-source projects that make up near 100% of the projects hosted on Codeberg on the other hand are easy marks for malicious litigation, just like home users torrenting movies were in the 1990ties and early 2000.
Lol Malus is not a parody.
You can verify it yourself but they do make money doing exactly what they say.
They play on that “parody/malevolent” idea but they do have customers and confirmed they make money on that.
There is a good chance that LLMs are sufficiently transformative that courts will decide they don’t infringe the copyright of their sources.
How much money are you willing to put in to test that?
5 Zimbabwean dollars.
So then why are you asking other people to on your behalf?
Hmm, maybe the bits of my post that you didn’t quote contain the answer.
First though you need to understand I’m mainly saying I don’t buy their justification.
An important consideration is that the usage of “AI” aka currently using like LLMs is viral, in a worse sense than eg.: the GPL is viral, and it’s completely understandable that some hosters would prefer to avoid the community problems that that causes.
I’ll just note that they can make whatever decision they want, its their platform, and considering its just forgejo underneath - you can always take it and host your own.
Also, I think it coincidentally lines up quite nicely with what we have here for posting an AI project now. Anything at that Generated stage is going to count as “mostly”.
I find it disappointing that people are upset with codeberg over this.
Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!
And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.
Its no different than when GarageBand was a thing - it was really accessible, so musicians who couldn’t figure out the tech side before (or didn’t want to pay money out for something) started using it heavily and really liked it. You also got an outsized influx of people who didn’t understand music who created a whole bunch of stuff that had… issues. You’d see people ask for feedback, and get constructive criticism, and they would just get pissed off at the lack of praise.
Which led to every time someone newer posted something they made, a bunch of comments about how horrible it was that people were pumping out garbage with GarageBand. The scale was much smaller obviously, but the results are the same as now imo.
I think some will start to us LLMs as a tool to get answers (instead of a stackoverflow link that is marked duplicate and the old post is gone or uses horribly outdated libraries), some will get lost thinking they are geniuses with unique prompt mastery, and others will move on. Time will tell though.
Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled.
As per usual, normies ruin everything.
Frankly, I don’t see where the whole big deal of this story is.
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else (even back to github) and/or found/support an alternative that better suits their needs.
It’s not like the world needs to have one git hosting service to rule them all, it’s not like there must be free ones (entitled much?), and it’s not like whatever service happens to be the new “cool” one must be neutral as to what they host.
BTW, although to my knowledge their policy is not enforced super-strictly, codeberg has never been neutral in this regard — see 1 and 2
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else
And Codeberg literally makes it easier for them, as you can just download or git clone Forgejo directly from them! When have we ever seen a breakup so amicable.
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else (even back to github) and/or found/support an alternative that better suits their needs.
searches
https://gitgud.io/ provides free GitLab hosting for open source projects.
https://gitlab.com/ has a free tier for personal/open source stuff, though looks like it has a 5 user limit on said free tier.
Gitea can be self-hosted. It doesn’t look like they provide free hosting themselves, though, just paid. Apparently it’s considerably less resource-intensive to host than GitLab.
GNU Savannah is available if one is writing projects under a specific set of licenses (the GPL family).
I use Forgejo which is either forked from or built on Gitea
Super easy to set up it was a docker container and a cloudflared tunnel.
How do you back up your git repos? Do you do that automatically through Forgejo or do you count on other members having the git repo updated?
Sorry for the off tangent question!
I didn’t, I hadn’t written code before that.
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else
Didn’t down vote ya but…This. This is what I’ve been saying for forever.
I agree, but I believe that there must be free git hosting and archiving for code projects.
What’s stopping you from doing it yourself? Be the change you want to see.
Sure, but that does not make it mandatorily Codeberg’s mission.
Sure, but it didn’t say that.
Why are we posting this random tech bloggers whiny complaint again?
I said it before: Codeberg uses Forgejo which is FOSS. If you don’t like Codeberg’s decision: stop complaining, self-host Forgejo and lose nothing.
But fwiw, Fuck AI coding, not only for its unmaintainability but also for stealing of intellectual property.
But fwiw, Fuck AI coding, not only for its unmaintainability but also for stealing of intellectual property.
Would you be okay with a coding model that was trained only on open source software?
Would you be okay with a coding model that was trained only on open source software?
Would be definitely interesting to see a coding model trained only on GPL code, where that also made all of the output also automatically GPL licensed.
I’ll offer a comparison not yet mentioned in the context of hosting software, but which should sound familiar in the social media context: moderation is hard at scale.
By every metric of scale, Codeberg is a competitor to the behemoth that is GitHub. And that means they have to contend with tough choices, such as who and what to host on their servers, no different than BlueSky, Facebook, and the individual instances of the Fediverse. And to be clear, Codeberg has always been limited to FOSS projects anyway, so nobody can genuinely argue that limits weren’t in the cards.
The distinction is that less alike Meta, and more alike with the Fediverse, Codeberg takes no hostages: people with obvious AI repos (or even marginal repos, given the possible ambiguity) are free to take their code and leave. Yes, they have to rebuild their CI pipelines, but that’s always required for any platform, including self hosting.
The fact is that Codeberg is a centralized entity that needs to (try to) make consistent policy. In this case, they have a concern about copyright and nothing anyone says can magically dematerialize that risk. If their new policy is not agreeable, then decentralized self hosting is probably the only way forward. But that was always an option with ForgeJo and federation.
And indeed, folks moving from GitHub or elsewhere are not exactly without fair warning that they might have to migrate again; we’ve not reached a utopia yet.
While I fully agree and support Codeberg stance on vibecoded projects I’m not sure I follow their reasoning here. For instance they complain about webcrawlers scraping their site to train their LLM models but I don’t see why getting rid of the vibecoded repositories wouldn’t make them more palatable for scrapers. A site full of human made code is infinitely more useful to those companies than a slop infested honeypot.
It’s two separate problems. Scrapers and heavy uploaders both consume resources.
I fail to see why people are getting worked up. While yes the tos says the ambiguous “mostly” the rest of the paragraph gives you a clear indication why. Copyright. Which I the same reason many other platforms don’t level allow vibe code into their codebases.
CB does not want to host code a large number of repos that in the future could be classified as stolen code, and now as the code host will have to do the work of deleting it all when they get sued for hosting it. And you know right holders are just waiting to do that.
So made up fears over settled law. Makes perfect sense.
Can you link me to the settled law?
Okay, so I lack the sources, so I ask others to please back me up; but isn’t this anything but settled law? There was something in the US but it was more of a recommendation than a law, and will have to be tested in court. Also, Codeberg is hosted in Germany, so its laws would apply there.
No, well founded reservations based on an ever changing legal landscape that varies from country to country.
It’s more than just the ‘mostly’. In legal proceedings they would really struggle to ‘demonstrate cause’, i.e. what is copyrighted, and what is not - not to mention demonstrating criminal intent.
As I wrote before, these are phase 2 effects of a new emerging technology. All it will take is one company to go after them in court to reverse this.
What do you mean? They are perfectly in their right to enforce this rule, even if they couldn’t prove that their reasoning made sense. They are not obligated to host your slop
I agree they are within their right to do it, I’m saying it legally wouldn’t survive a challenge in court the way they implemented it.
No need for your combative tone or assuming I have slop that needs hosting.
Where were you during the nineties and early 2000?
Man were there brutal unjust lawsuits that broke people. Remember that 11 yo girl vs Madonna? The Pirate Bay? And so on.
How would it be legally challengeable? No one can be legally forced to host someone else’s data against their will, that sounds ludicrous, otherwise people could sue YouTube for removing their videos before they were legally required to.
The TOS are essentially a way to let you know what they will consider, but legally they can remove your repo without any reason, they’re not legally required to host your data.
Again, you’re right, but the TOS do need to be clear and unambiguous which this is not. This is - like a lot of Lemmy these days- a knee jerk response to a novel technology that’s not fully understood. That’s obvious because of how the rules are worded.
This opens them up to anti discrimination lawsuits - which are take quite serious in German courts. They would have to demonstrate that a user is banned from uploading work because it is “mostly” LLM generated and not because they are trans or black or something.
I know this is unpopular opinion on Lemmy atm, but this genie isn’t going back in the bottle. And it is very difficult to fence against because when used properly as an assisting tool, and not as an oracle of truth or a full self driving vibecoding machine, the code quality is basically indistinguishable from human code.
I’m not saying Codeberg can’t do this, I’m saying they will struggle once there is serious pushback on this and it will hopefully open up the discussions on copyright and their place in modern society. Akin to how guns are still made and used, but the more advanced countries have strict laws around who can purchase them and who can use them and for what purpose.
I’m not a law expert, but I think even in Germany you would need to prove a pattern not a one off banned a black/trans person to accuse of discrimination. Otherwise any negative repercussion to a black/trans person would generate a discrimination lawsuit, and that just seems absurd.
I assume that if codeberg forces this it will do so with the most egregious offenders, because like you have pointed out it’s impossible to differentiate good code written with AI tools from good code written without them, but bad code written with AI tools is sometimes very differentiable from bad code written without them. And at the end of the day they’re trying to safe-guard against lawsuits over it (as the person uploading the code is not the owner) and becoming a slop repository.
But also, here’s the thing, they’re not making money of you hosting your code there, so it’s much harder to force them to take someone’s data. You could force Google to host your photos if you were unjustly banned, you can’t force me to do so if you found a loophole to use my server for that.
Alright, I just don’t understand what you mean by “a challenge in court”. In this case, you couldn’t challenge them on these rules, a court could do nothing about them.
I think the “regret” post misses an entire point, that Codeberg doesn’t want to be the place where AI stuff is hosted. Maybe it wasn’t clear in their communications but it always seemed to me the copyright and resource stuff was more of a justification of something they wanted to do anyways.
Also everyone suggesting AI should just be treated as a tool comfortably ignores the externalized costs. Maybe there’s some “yeah it sucks but we can’t to anything and it so we just use it” and that’s it. I’m so tired of lengthy AI-is-just-a-tool justifications that are omitting the central point.
The article seems correct with the “Codeberg’s reputation” clause though. That one smells bad, not sure why they felt the need to add it.
If you’re running a site that anyone from the public can sign up to, resources are not some afterthought you add to your argument like pepper. Resources are everything. I have been on this Internet since NCSA Mosaic; look up the term “hugged to death”.
everyone suggesting AI should just be treated as a tool comfortably ignores the externalized costs.
Thank you. Electrical, environmental, intellectual, economical…
if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
I pretty much said this in the other thread. Unless you own the platform, or a significant investor in said platform, you are subject to the whims of the platform, good, bad, or indifferent. Some don’t like that I guess because they feel like they supported the platform, may have contributed to the platform, but at the end of the day, the platform dictates law for the platform.
Kind of like lemmy.selfhosted. There are rules. If you don’t bother yourself with reading the rules before posting, you get what you get.
Lots of people who have never used Codeberg and don’t understand the difference between Codeberg and Forgejo are very angry about this.
And people also don’t understand the difference between a non profit managed in good will by people and a capitalist saas provider that has billions to spend in hundreds and hundreds of people to maintain an ever growing central place to host all corporate interests.
The internet is becoming ridiculous.
I don’t want to depend on a platform that rewrites its terms of service on a whim, without properly announcing that the change was even under consideration, and without giving its users a way to weigh in.
[…]
I wish it had linked to a discussion thread, or at the very least a poll, so that I could have voiced the concern I have
Then you should’ve joined Codeberg e.V. which gives you access to both a forum and a voting platform.
For context, that comes for the HN thread and blog post, not from anything I have written. Let’s attribute things to respective sources :)
Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean to address you personally and should’ve used they/them.
So you’re that tech blogger?
Nope, not me. The article popped up in my feed, I commented on it (over on /c/rtfa) and then shared if here. Feel free to check.
I believe he’s just a suspicious carrot, but what do I know, I’m just a random Lemmy commenter.
Ah yes, if you wanted a say you should’ve paid €50 to join something nobody ever told you about. How very open and community spirited.
something nobody ever told you about
Other than it being explained in big letters on the very front page of Codeberg?
Well that’s just how Codeberg works. It’s run by volunteers and organized as a registered association. This association strives to be very democratic about what happens to the platform, but you have to join it to gain insights and voting rights.
Of course you don’t have to and most users of Codeberg don’t - but you can and this makes Codeberg a lot more open and democratic than any other commercial platform.
