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Codeberg Git Hosting Platform Bans Projects Mostly Written by Generative AI (linuxiac.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/opensource@programming.dev
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[–] 17 points 3 days ago* (1 child)

Banning "AI" is too broad and too shortsighted.

They haven't done that. The actual terms are

You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

See also their blog post, where they specifically mentions experiments as "tolerated":

Side projects and experiments with little resource usage

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

    I have indeed read the blog post and much more on their matrix and mastodon. The cited TOS are incredibly vague. What defines "mostly"? What defines "tolerated"?

    Am I ok with my projects being "tolerated" or would I like to publish them on a platform that doesn't hate me by default?

    What makes all of this much worse is that people from Codeberg when asked how they will enforce the new TOS give conflicting answers, they themselves don't know how to deal with that yet. Even in the blog post they say

    "We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion."

    You can't possibly be more vague than that, and it creates an unnecessary uncertainty and opens the door to moderation abuse in the name of a vague TOS one-liner. In consequence it now depends entirely on the codeberg admins' individual perception of what the TOS one-liner means to assess if your project should be killed. Having seen some outright toxic behaviour of Codeberg people on mastodon and in the matrix chat regarding that topic I have serious doubts that this will be handled in a transparent way. The way codeberg is handling this topic is just just irresponsible and piss poor communication. I have completely lost my trust in them and will move on.

    Edit: I think a good approach would have been to have a discussion about it not only among members but also among the userbase, and then deciding on how to go forward. But the way it seems to have happened (hearsay tbh) there wasn't even a real discussion among the members, the TOS change was simply an agenda item in the members meeting which was then voted upon.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    Neither of those terms seem problematic to me; a plain reading would be "mostly" means more than half of the code, and "tolerated" would mean that the ban is not enforced on such projects. Of course, if you are already operating under the assumption that Codeberg is acting in bad faith, then it doesn't matter what the terms of service says nor how they they might say that they interpret them.

    It is, however, not surprising that their terms of service are subject to interpretation. That was already the case before they added these particular terms. For example, the Codeberg TOS already included a prohibition against "content that harms the reputation of Codeberg" before the recent changes. Codeberg simply added projects related to cryptocurrency as an example, when the ban was voted through. It is furthermore the case that most, if not all, terms of service are subject to interpretation. We are talking about documents describing human behavior, not machine code.

    If this kind of thing is not acceptable to you, then your only real solution is to self-host

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