AIWatch.

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.

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.

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.