Comment by hedora
4 days ago
So, I guess Codeberg doesn't meet the free software bar any more. The FSF defines four freedoms, and they are all pretty clearly being violated by the no LLM policy. They're blocking people based on how they use codeberg (freedom 0), preventing less experienced users from improving / modifying code (freedom 1), based on an argument that you can modify software, but only how they tell you to, and certainly not with an LLM (freedom 2), and of course they are blocking a distribution channel based on these criteria (freedom 3).
In summary: A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
I guess no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, but they've intentionally and significantly lowered the bar with these decisions. I'm happy they did this before I bothered to migrate. Does anyone know of a good alternative to Forgejo? I was thinking of self hosting, but now I just want nothing to do with this organization.
Codeberg is a service, not software. If we applied this standard then Codeberg would already have been in violation of the 4 Freedoms because they forbid distribution of CSAM (I would hope).
Forgejo is unaffected by this because it's the software not the service and is not subject to the service's terms of service. You're misunderstanding the scope of this policy change.
I tried to address this when I pointed out no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, and the FSF also addressed it with the word "adequately".
The policy change means that some free software projects are no longer welcome on codeberg, specifically because those projects take a stronger stance towards protecting free software than codeberg.
What am I misunderstanding? Why should I trust them as stewards of forgejo?
Why shouldn't you? Linus won't let me post erotic Sonic fanfiction to the mailing list, but I still trust Linux to be a safe platform to write erotic Sonic fanfiction.
I thought "don't like it, fork it" was the open source credo? You don't have to trust them as stewards. Fork and maintain it yourself then.
Forgejo was forked from gitea when the later introduced some controversial business strategies. Gitea was forked from Gogs because gogs did not accept outside contributions.
See a trend? Maybe you can be the next.
I am not well informed on this Codeberg story, but could this simply be a way for them to avoid some of the destructive loads that GitHub has been experiencing since "vibe coding" became a thing? Maybe the code origin purity test is just a way to explain it?
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/23/codeberg-gi...
(1) Cache the non logged-in pages. You can even host static pages in an unmetered way. They maintain their web service software. They should just do that. If an account is knocking over infra by scraping, ban the account. Make it slightly harder to sign up or something, if necessary.
(2) Vibe coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and the grok thing all prefer local copies of a project to scraping web services. Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
(3) If they are worried about AI companies shifting costs (What costs though? See point 1), they should block training scrapers, or - even better - offer a service that resells zero-log-retention / enclaved open-weight LLM inference. This cuts off the revenue stream to the AI companies, and probably lets codeberg skim a bit to expand their own services.
We used to use github at work. It was falling over well before cursor was a thing. Blaming AI for their 1-2 nines of availability is... questionable.
Yes, I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
> Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
Because a significant percentage of "developers using LLM" have no clue what they are doing?
They said vibe coded projects are consuming excessive CI resources
The Codeberg blog post does mention those costs, but also a lot of other objections they have to LLMs so not simply away to avoid the loads. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.
Codeberg isn't software so the FSF's definition of software freedom is not relevant.
The essay "Who Does That Server Really Serve?" from the FSF explains why their definition of software freedom is more relevant for SaaS than it is for proprietary software:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
In it Stallman gets dangerously close to admitting it's possible to be worse than Microsoft Windows. After documenting spyware and universal back doors in Windows, the section of the article comparing proprietary software to SaaS concludes:
SaaSS is equivalent to running proprietary software with spyware and a universal back door. It gives the server operator unjust power over the user, and unjust power is something we must resist.
It even has a section towards the end addressing the slippery slopes that github-style services provide:
Use of simple software repositories is not SaaSS because most of the actual work (as distinguished from redistribution) is done in the contributors' computers. However, when the repository starts doing other kinds of computing work for the users, such as running tests, that starts to cross the line. When the users are contributing to the project, so the work is the project's work rather than the contributor's work, that still is not SaaSS for the users. But it may be SaaSS for the project. However, if the testing means running the programs that the project develops, it is not SaaSS because the project does control the crucial software being run.
Forgejo, the software powering Codeberg, is FOSS.
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> The FSF defines four freedoms, and they are all pretty clearly being violated by the no LLM policy.
No they're not. The four freedoms apply only to software licences.
Codeberg is not software.
Forgejo is, and remains FOSS.
Codeberg provides a free service and is under no obligation to cater to cryptobros and vibecoders. You can buy a VM and host your own.
Not sure why this is down voted.
You cannot support FOSS and then get mad when people use those freedoms to create a service that matches their ideas and philosophies.
I'm not mad that they have a fork of some FOSS software that they use. I'm upset that they're actively trying to take away other people's freedom under the banner of a non-profit whose mission is to support FOSS software projects.
That's worse than just some random group lying loudly about its intentions. They're getting tax benefits that probably should be yanked unless they change their charter. They also accepted donations to further the existing charter, and they're doing the opposite.
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