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Comment by astrobe_

4 days ago

Codeberg already had relatively strong opinions before that; their Terms of Use also says:

"the right to use the content for any purpose, including both commercial and non-commercial purposes" "Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement"

So yes, "the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken", nothing really new actually.

IMHO, deciding to migrate because of a disagreement that doesn't have practical consequences on the author is a bit of an overreaction. It is not, by the way, a full ban on LLM, as the clause says mostly LLM-generated, a term that has been criticized for its vagueness in other places, but that does leaves some room for thoughtful use.

But why stop using a service we are satisfied with because of virtual future other decisions that might or might not affect us? It's like if people left their country before the candidate for president they fear, is even elected.

It's always amusing to see people concern troll about slippery slopes as if Codeberg didn't already have requirements (some vibes based) for the repositories they host. But people hate change and will knee-jerk react to announcements like these. It reminds me of the absolute meltdowns people have over Rust in Linux (remember the hysteria when Rust became a hard dependency for apt?).

  • > people hate change

    Not related, but this is an assumption one should automatically reject as soon as it comes to mind.

    People do like change, when it is for the better. People have happily moved from SVN to Git, from Vi to Neovim, from Coke to Pepsi (find better examples yourself) etc... People may be emotional about change, but they are not stubborn (generally). Usually they just don't perceive the benefits of the new thing (or they are outweighed by the drawbacks for them). Sometimes "better" has a subjective part that you can't argue about, so you have to "agree to disagree". But it's better to disagree on an opinion than to assume that they don't like change.

There is a legitimate and probably significant set of people who agree with the pro-free software, copyleft, non-commercial etc outlook but don't have the same analysis of AI and LLM-generated tooling. There was nothing in the terms of use prior to this move to indicate those tools were out of bounds or that those opinions were unwelcome. Nor anything about tool use at all.

All those people were just told they're not welcome.

BTW the nuance in the blog post is retroactive and done after the vote was completed. The vote had no such nuance and requests for clarification were refused.