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.

Platforms that are known for making moral judgments will likely keep making moral judgments in the future. Eventually, they'll make a judgment that you heavily disagree with.

This is why communities founded on ideology tend to shatter, while those founded on a shared goal tend to survive. Linus doesn't care whether you're a GPU expert at AMD, a 16-year-old in Nairobi, or a nazi with a swastika tattooed on your arm. He cares about the quality of your kernel patches.

"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/

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.

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.

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

Want to use other tools? Move somewhere else.

First:

> 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).

Second:

> - Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related 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.

This feels like a strange statement. Unless you are going out of you way to disguise AI contributions it's extremely simple to do some git magic to get an exact percentage. But you can also just ask AI and it'll tell you directly. And even if you've tried to disguise it I'm fairly certain that if you set aside 10$ for tokens, it'll be able to deduce how much is AI even with someone having tried to disguise it.

[1]: https://codefloe.com/

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.

Github allows private repos, organization access control etc. I don't see how Codeberg is competition.

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").

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.

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.

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?

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...

[2] https://radicle.dev/

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.

> 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.

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?

For those of us who are tired of AI messing with things, stop complaining and let this be. Codeberg made a great decision for those who are just tired and over AI coding unnecessarily taking over everything.

How ironic. Why is the burden of labor on the open source community? They have to do more volunteer work for your AI satisfaction, even after training the very models you depend on? I think proponents of AI are the ones who have the burden of figuring out how to engage with the open source community. Use your own tokens to figure it out. Surely AI is up to the task. Your frontier models have the entirety of human diplomacy at its fingertips to steer you towards the path of success. I wish you luck.

Is it just me, or does this read rather naive?

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021856

It’s also got a great ci/ci experience.

This first sentence is such a weasel-acknowledgement that is used to just effectively ignore all of it.

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.

Everyone who says stuff like this is just burying their head in the sand. That is like saying that there are serious questions about the ethics of buying sweatshop-made clothes, or driving a gas-powered car, or robbing grocery stores --- but those are becoming part of life, and so we need to "figure out how to engage with them".

That doesn't mean you have to upend your life to fight the good fight. You can say "I want a world without X, but right now I need X to live, so I do X, while maintaining an awareness of it and looking for opportunities to do less X". You can say "I want a world with some kinds of X but not others, so I do the X that I'm okay with". You can even say "I think X is ethically fine so I'll do it". But it just doesn't make sense to say "there are ethical issues with X, but those only affect how we engage with it, and have no bearing on whether we think people should need to engage with it at all".

There can't be ethical consideration of "how" without at least considering the ethics of "whether".

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.