Comment by adamddev1
4 days ago
> In addition, Codeberg conflates “having a community” with “being legitimate software worth hosting”
I don't think this is a fair summary. I don't see this conflation in Codeberg's blog post. The words in quotation marks don't actually exist in Codeberg's blog post.
It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team. The concern is that some people don't gobble up an unfair amount of resources.
I personally have been moving to self-hosted Foregejo for ultimate freedom. But I also think it's fair for some providers have the freedom to take a bit more of a harsh (or based - depending on your perspective) stance against LLM generated code. I mean, a lot of people have been bemoaning the fact that the human-generated material has been increasingly hard to find in a sea of AI-generated material. It could be nice to have a corner of curated, human-made code still available on the web.
> It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
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> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
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[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
[1] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/
> they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas
For one, they've already done this to an extent. For two, they're also doing this by deciding what projects are and are not welcome on their service in the first place.
If 9 people eat an apple or two a day but a tenth person wants to eat 100 apples a day, we don't have to set some apple limit. We can tell the tenth person to pound sand and keep giving everyone else the apples they want.
Having a hard quota means each spammer will fill up the quota, then get some error they don't know how to fix and stop. This means the quota has to be low.
Just saying "no spam" means you don't have to waste a single byte on spam and everyone else can have a higher quota.
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>but whenever something expresses its right to do or not do
The problem (or the virtue?) of this comment is that it's impossible to decipher with which side it disagrees, and for what reason too. Cause both sides expressed their right to do or not to do.
> They aren't obligated to do any of that; they own the platform.
> Play ball or get out.
People can say things on their way out, and this is what's happening.
They don’t pay tax, right? Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s definitely a different (and public) conversation when things are claimed done for the public benefit and thus exempt from tax.
At least in the US tax-exempt status carries obligations.
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In the ai-article op did say they’d do exactly that. Though it is surprising they left GitHub due to ““enshittification” of the platform under Microsoft’s ownership”, when it’s likely GitHub is using similar ai practices the op is and matches their exact ai usage.
Citing the op themselves: “ an alarming number of self-described AI experts whose expertise appeared to consist entirely of having a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and the willingness to write about it in seventeen-paragraph posts.”
Resources were never part of the original discussion. It was about values. This is the author of the ToU addition the day it landed: https://mastodon.social/@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social/1169...
He also has a lot of posts since: https://mastodon.social/@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social
If you can’t keep up with the load, say that. Limit new signups and/or implement rate limiting, and ideally scale up if you can.
DO NOT try to spin that into taking some form of moral high ground. DO NOT make yourself the arbiter of what is and is not considered a worthwhile project. That is not neutral. That is not free.
They're not obligated to deal with the higher load brought on by people's LLM coded projects, CI pipelines etc. In order to keep things freed up and flexible for others, I think it's fair for them to say, "in this community, we're going to save the space for more hand-coded projects."
It's not fair for everyone to have to eat the costs of AI (like communities getting bulldozed for data centers) and just accept that it has to be used.
Of course nobody is obligated and I never claimed that. In fact, I fucking hate the LLM hypetrain. But this decision is decidedly non-neutral and non-free.
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Agree. Providers who don't want to deal with LLM generated code should be respected as part of the free market. Let the market decide which direction is for the better or at least allow for niches that cater to certain audiences.
It's wild to me that nobody is considering enforcement. Part of the reason this is a bad rule is because there's no way to actually validate what is an LLM coded project. And the AI train is not nearly at its destination. Things are going to change dramatically over the next four years. My prediction? This is not going to age well.
It'll be the same as literally every other ToS ever: if they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're blatantly violating the terms, they kick you off. If they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're subtly violating the terms, they lock out whatever is causing the problem and get in contact with you.
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That is fine unless you claim to be a neutral and free as in freedom service provider. You are clearly not at that point.
Define resources and create a better limit then. 10 small code-only projects will take orders of magnitude less storage, bandwidth and cpu than one project with committed image and sound assets.
It's a community code forge. If someone poured their heart and soul into making an awesome game with kick-ass image and sound assets, the community probably wants to support it.
Their stance is obvious: if you just want dumb git hosting with a freemium model, use something else.
The resource limit are quite clear: From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
And as long as it's hand-made, that's fine.
What is hand made code? Does that mean no auto complete? No linters?
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> people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources
So block huge resource use? What if people use LLMs with disproportionately tiny resource use?
Making a principled ban against LLM would seem to allow for more freedom and flexibility with usage limits. People who are creating more by hand would still be allowed to have more breathing room. With a hard limit of resources everyone would be more restricted. That's also a solution, but it's just a totally different approach. The LLM ban could help to allow for freedom without the resources getting overwhelmed.
Only if you can reasonably separate LLM from non LLM code, which is in no way a solved problem. Even if one agrees with their priorities 100%, it's just asking for non-automated enforcement. It's difficult to execute, and either lead to completely arbitrary enforcement, or a lot of resources being spent in exchange for this freedom you mention. It's just a very hard practical line to try to draw.
And let's be real, most of the costs LLMs incur on hosting providers have little to so ln who makes commits. A popular project than bans LLMs from contributing, but is used often by LLMs that are using the project as a library is indistinguishable from one that allows LLM contributors.
So from a practical perspective, it's a head scratcher
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> principled ban against LLM
So was it about high resource use, or a principle?
> People who are creating more by hand would still be allowed to have more breathing room.
What about the breathing of people creating by hand with a sprinkle of an LLM?
> but it's just a totally different approach.
Indeed, a better one where you manage directly the issue you claim to care about
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The main problem is that so many LLM users are selfish bastards and they won't respect the spirit of such rules and will only stop when the hard disk quotas force them to.
So now your solution entails lowering the quota for everybody because allowing in LLyou must assume eve
How does adding a few words to TOS stop "selfish bastards"?
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I think you are wrong. A better way is to have a free tier and charge for usage.
Codeberg is a registered non-profit charity whose purpose is to provide free services for free software projects. You can make a different site that works the way you want it to.
Yeah, I really wish all the people whining about Codeberg would give us all pointers to free alternatives that don't have these restrictions.
And, if those alternatives don't exist, well, you now understand why Codeberg is taking the position they are.
https://github.com
Microsoft shitware garbage that barely works anymore.
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Yeah, the natural solution here is to only offer some amount of hosting for free and then charge for larger amounts of code to host. Those quotas are something that is empirical and observable and can be managed. But instead, they're implementing a rule that is unenforceable because you can't actually validate whether or not the majority of the project was written by an LLM. They just chose a suboptimal path and pissed a bunch of people off in the process, and their terms of service makes this out like some kind of copyright or security issue. It's just silly.
Terms of use are a statement of intent, not an if-else ladder to be executed by a computer.
A more relevant quote is "to enable equal opportunities regarding the access to knowledge and education." from their mission statement. As a gemeinnütziger Verein (charitable association) their charta is legally binding.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others...
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the spicy autocomplete.
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