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Codeberg Divides
written on July 24, 2026
Codeberg recently changed its
terms to
exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want
GitHub to face competition I have thoughts.
[changed its
terms](https://lobste.rs/s/ax914v/protecting_our_floss_commons_from_llms)
[want
GitHub to face competition](/2026/4/28/before-github/)
Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with
members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But
democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is
inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A
majority can still decide that certain projects and people no longer belong.
GitHub’s governance has never been democratic and there is plenty about the
platform that I dislike. Yet democracy is not the main property I need from
infrastructure. I need it to be predictable, dependable, and reasonably
neutral towards the legal Open Source software hosted on it. A democratic
provider without a clear constitution can be worse at those things than a
corporation.
The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit
projects that
mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed
codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably
assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is
open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable. In practice
the center will probably lose out, as it has a bias.
[terms prohibit
projects](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse.md)
A harsher line would probably be preferable. If Codeberg wants no LLM
involvement, it should say so. If it wants to prevent autonomous repository
spam and abusive resource consumption, it should write rules for those instead.
The current middle ground delegates too much of the policy to moderators and
community norms. I’m currently assuming the community around it draws a much
harsher social boundary, making projects and maintainers unwelcome even when
they technically comply.
It is a real shame that the Open Source and Free Software communities are
splitting this deeply over LLMs and agents. 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.
The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not
just divide into camps. 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.
As I mentioned before, I want GitHub to face true competition in the Open Source
space. I would particularly like some of it to come from associations rather
than another large corporation. As a European project, Codeberg naturally
matters to me even more. 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.
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. It has every right to make the choice it made, but I just do not think it
is a good one.
This entry was tagged
ai,
open-source and
thoughts
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