I think this move by Codeberg is lowkey genius. They're trying to build a community based on a set of shared values. Those who disagree with those values are now self-selecting out of the Codeberg community, which is exactly the point of passing these kinds of resolutions.
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.
show comments
jjouett
Its a choice they're totally allowed to make, I just wish we'd get an updated mission statement[1]:
"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."
This is the problem with choosing platform for moral — instead of practical — reasons.
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.
kay_o
I don't understand why people are referring to Codeberg as competitors, or going to competition. They're WANTING you to go back => GitHub and consume the GitHub's resource's if you do not conform to their traditionalist nonprofit view.
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.
PaulDavisThe1st
I have no particular problem with this decision/policy on the part of 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.
show comments
kccqzy
I don’t even mind forges taking a stance on AI. That’s fine. But I agree with Armin Ronacher here: banning projects that “mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools” is like the infamous Supreme Court “I know it when I see it” line. Yes of course I know a project mostly written by generative AI when I see it.
show comments
seanclayton
> The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future
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.
CodesInChaos
I think introducing unpredictable new prohibitions is a much bigger problem than the specific bans on cryptocurrency or AI written code. Especially when it leads to existing code becoming unavailable and doesn't just ban new contributions violating the rules.
cdrnsf
This decision is consistent with the community Codeberg has attracted of late. It's smaller, independent and takes stances that are not in line with competitors like GitHub. If you want something less reliable, at larger scale and filled with AI projects that GitHub is clearly encouraging, you should use GitHub.
cesarb
> I wish Codeberg were more forward-looking here: willing to host the Open Source software of tomorrow, not only software made in the ways its community approves of today.
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").
Codeberg should host code, and should not be bothered by which tool the code is written. Let's wait until GitHub starts accepting only code written in VS Code or Visual Studio because those are Microsofts tools.
Want to use other tools? Move somewhere else.
frangonf
I am a heavy viber that uses a lot of resources in github now after LLMs compared with pre-LLMs for my personal 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.
xvilka
Maybe it will push more people and more effort into the true decentralization since the Forgejo/Codeberg federation[1] effort is way too slowly moving. Radicle[2] it is.
> It can choose to be a smaller community with a stronger political identity, but that is a different ambition from being a broad and dependable European alternative to GitHub.
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.
Is there any evidence of division? Are all the vibe-coders going to some codeberg2? One of the main complaints is that the banned projects don't have human users proportionate to their activity, so if they all go to codeberg2, then that forge would just be full of projects nobody cares about.
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?
show comments
infecto
It is a bad rule. Their community and their choice but I hope we get some fresh options in the open source universe.
gladimdim
So, i will self host all of mh gh mirrors on synology. Never liked strange us/eu "communities" with their strange values anyways
arjie
There’s a lot of hue and cry over what’s just Yet Another Bulletin Board because it has a git repo attached? Just host this stuff yourself guys. It’s trivial these days.
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.
nottorp
> Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts.
Github allows private repos, organization access control etc. I don't see how Codeberg is competition.
show comments
Arainach
> But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made. The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not just divide into camps.
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.
eberfreitas
> More importantly, LLMs if done and used well, should be welcome to all of us. They could be used to reclaim control and power, away from large corporations and institutions.
Is it just me, or does this read rather naive?
warkdarrior
Resistance to all forms of oppression is a duty.
Zsfe510asG
I see. We should not divide into camps so the Austrians can sell their AI startups.
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.
gladimdim
So, only self hosting. Gonna mirror my github repos on my synology!
Hendrikto
Fully agree. I am against AI slop, LLM overhyping, and cryto scams, as much as anybody, however:
> 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.
show comments
jmull
It seems to me, Codeberg sees no value in AI slop and doesn't want to spend significant amounts of its limited resources hosting it.
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?
TheJoYo
I'd rather have a way to quickly ID what deltas were generated and which were not but that will never happen if it becomes a weapon to ban a project.
nilslindemann
Considering the fact that AI-written code is the future, Codeberg has damned itself to be a niche project forever.
So are they going to have "AI" police this? Heuristics about check-in size and scope are still AI, albeit "classical AI."
show comments
yogthos
A great way to ensure that most developers will not be using Codeberg going forward. While there's a ton of drama around LLM use right now, anybody who's actually used this tech in anger understands that these tools really do work, and that they will only be used more in the future. I guess Codeberg is angling to become a small artisanal community, and there might certainly be a niche for that.
show comments
philipwhiuk
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made.
This first sentence is such a weasel-acknowledgement that is used to just effectively ignore all of it.
2001zhaozhao
I write almost all code with GenAI nowadays. I'd like to say it's not slop, but I guess now there's no way to get Codeberg to agree.
show comments
cmrdporcupine
Agree substantially here, as I said elsewhere: the honest and respectful answer from the Codeberg community would have been: add resource limits, quotas, and a reviewed application form for new projects.
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.
show comments
dmitrygr
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But
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.
show comments
pelasaco
It's typical Berlin. Try with virtue signaling. Get overrun by reality. Impose Censorship. But for the good <3
show comments
ralph84
That's the beauty of the internet, everyone can find their space. Even the buggy whip makers.
I think this move by Codeberg is lowkey genius. They're trying to build a community based on a set of shared values. Those who disagree with those values are now self-selecting out of the Codeberg community, which is exactly the point of passing these kinds of resolutions.
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.
Its a choice they're totally allowed to make, I just wish we'd get an updated mission statement[1]:
"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/
This is the problem with choosing platform for moral — instead of practical — reasons.
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.
I don't understand why people are referring to Codeberg as competitors, or going to competition. They're WANTING you to go back => GitHub and consume the GitHub's resource's if you do not conform to their traditionalist nonprofit view.
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.
I have no particular problem with this decision/policy on the part of 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.
I don’t even mind forges taking a stance on AI. That’s fine. But I agree with Armin Ronacher here: banning projects that “mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools” is like the infamous Supreme Court “I know it when I see it” line. Yes of course I know a project mostly written by generative AI when I see it.
> The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future
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.
I think introducing unpredictable new prohibitions is a much bigger problem than the specific bans on cryptocurrency or AI written code. Especially when it leads to existing code becoming unavailable and doesn't just ban new contributions violating the rules.
This decision is consistent with the community Codeberg has attracted of late. It's smaller, independent and takes stances that are not in line with competitors like GitHub. If you want something less reliable, at larger scale and filled with AI projects that GitHub is clearly encouraging, you should use GitHub.
> I wish Codeberg were more forward-looking here: willing to host the Open Source software of tomorrow, not only software made in the ways its community approves of today.
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").
Related:
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
Codeberg should host code, and should not be bothered by which tool the code is written. Let's wait until GitHub starts accepting only code written in VS Code or Visual Studio because those are Microsofts tools.
Want to use other tools? Move somewhere else.
I am a heavy viber that uses a lot of resources in github now after LLMs compared with pre-LLMs for my personal 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.
Maybe it will push more people and more effort into the true decentralization since the Forgejo/Codeberg federation[1] effort is way too slowly moving. Radicle[2] it is.
[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
[2] https://radicle.dev/
> It can choose to be a smaller community with a stronger political identity, but that is a different ambition from being a broad and dependable European alternative to GitHub.
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.
Codeberg going down the path of Blueskyification
codefloe[1] also runs forgejo.
[1]: https://codefloe.com/
Is there any evidence of division? Are all the vibe-coders going to some codeberg2? One of the main complaints is that the banned projects don't have human users proportionate to their activity, so if they all go to codeberg2, then that forge would just be full of projects nobody cares about.
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?
It is a bad rule. Their community and their choice but I hope we get some fresh options in the open source universe.
So, i will self host all of mh gh mirrors on synology. Never liked strange us/eu "communities" with their strange values anyways
There’s a lot of hue and cry over what’s just Yet Another Bulletin Board because it has a git repo attached? Just host this stuff yourself guys. It’s trivial these days.
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.
> Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts.
Github allows private repos, organization access control etc. I don't see how Codeberg is competition.
> But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made. The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not just divide into camps.
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.
> More importantly, LLMs if done and used well, should be welcome to all of us. They could be used to reclaim control and power, away from large corporations and institutions.
Is it just me, or does this read rather naive?
Resistance to all forms of oppression is a duty.
I see. We should not divide into camps so the Austrians can sell their AI startups.
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.
So, only self hosting. Gonna mirror my github repos on my synology!
Fully agree. I am against AI slop, LLM overhyping, and cryto scams, as much as anybody, however:
> 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.
It seems to me, Codeberg sees no value in AI slop and doesn't want to spend significant amounts of its limited resources hosting it.
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?
I'd rather have a way to quickly ID what deltas were generated and which were not but that will never happen if it becomes a weapon to ban a project.
Considering the fact that AI-written code is the future, Codeberg has damned itself to be a niche project forever.
Related:
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
So are they going to have "AI" police this? Heuristics about check-in size and scope are still AI, albeit "classical AI."
A great way to ensure that most developers will not be using Codeberg going forward. While there's a ton of drama around LLM use right now, anybody who's actually used this tech in anger understands that these tools really do work, and that they will only be used more in the future. I guess Codeberg is angling to become a small artisanal community, and there might certainly be a niche for that.
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made.
This first sentence is such a weasel-acknowledgement that is used to just effectively ignore all of it.
I write almost all code with GenAI nowadays. I'd like to say it's not slop, but I guess now there's no way to get Codeberg to agree.
Agree substantially here, as I said elsewhere: the honest and respectful answer from the Codeberg community would have been: add resource limits, quotas, and a reviewed application form for new projects.
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.
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But
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.
It's typical Berlin. Try with virtue signaling. Get overrun by reality. Impose Censorship. But for the good <3
That's the beauty of the internet, everyone can find their space. Even the buggy whip makers.