these things always end with community disintegration. Eventually, some high profile user will cross the undefined line or leaders change and want to rewrite the rule then half the community will side with them and half will not.

The goal is to reduce the amount of use of the platform, and I think imposing this rule is an excellent way to do that. Not sure I'd call it genius, though. There's a fair likelihood of unintended consequences.

This is a lesson I learned in life: When you want to build something social (in this case a community, but it could also be a romantic relationship, a friendship...), the best thing you can do is to polarize as quickly as possible.

Too many people are afraid to offend and waste everyone's time going along with things they don't really agree with and end up pretending to be somebody they're not to get along with people they don't really like.

No! Get your most polarizing takes out quickly. Either you and the other person stop wasting time because there's no fit, or you will deepen the relationship and both know it's a good fit. Either way, it's better for everyone involved.

There's enough people out in this big world that you don't need to always make everyone happy. It's much better to quickly comb through to find the gems.

I’ve seen so many variations of this where a community starts adding more rules that are open to judgment.

Removing the obvious rule breakers looks like an easy win at first. Then over time the list of rules grows. Small groups become good at navigating the rule making process and getting changes pushed through. Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors. The community was long since cleared out from anyone who got sick of the drama, leaving a weird internal battle where different in groups are fighting with each other over little things and turning the rules against each other.

Maybe Codeberg will be different. Maybe the rule making stops here and it’s reasonably enforced against only the really bad examples, with leeway granted to others generously. Maybe it doesn’t turn into a slippery slope of little dramas that exhaust everyone who isn’t invested in the constant background drama of their code hosting site. I hope it does for their sake.

But I also think enough people like me have seen what happens to communities that go down the path of generating a lot of rules like these and will choose to steer clear of this site. It always feels like a good idea when you and all your friends are on the right side of the rules, but it’s less fun when you find yourself making choices or tip toeing around to avoid triggering the Nth round of rules that were introduced 10 steps past where you thought the rules were in a good and balanced place.

I've been thinking along these lines more and more. Trying to specify exact limits and trying to account for every possible situation when making rules just encourages people to find holes and workarounds. It creates a game, a competition between the rule makers and everyone else.

When instead you state higher level values and ask for cooperation, it encourages us to work together. It's the Honor System instead of a deliberate competition between rule makers and everyone else.

Concrete example: sports

When you are playing with a group of friends and there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part because we all love the game and want to have a good time.

Once you introduce referees, the game within the game of "what can I get away with?" starts and you end up with players learning how to foul without getting caught and then players overreacting to fouls in order to make sure the rule breakers still get caught, and then it evolves into flopping to get a foul called even when there was none, and eventually people start to hate the sport altogether (see: NBA, FIFA)

Concrete example: government and police forces. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?

They didn't consult a lawyer when they wrote that. The idea that public domain code that is not copyrightable is incompatible with the GPL is simply not true. sqlite is in the public domain and not copyrightable, for example.

Their decision leans too heavily on what that court decision said. It was actually fairly nuanced.

The court explicitly declined to address whether Thaler could be considered the author because he created the AI, because Thaler originally listed the machine as the sole author in his registration application.

It is clear that works generated entirely by AI without meaningful human contribution are not eligible for copyright protection, though it does not resolve questions regarding AI-assisted works where human input is significant, which is a predominant use case with AI-assisted coding.

Finally, it appears they're unfamiliar with copyright rules around non-copyrightable works that are combined with other creative copyrightable works. The result is almost universally copyrightable. I'm hedging because I haven't thought through the cases exhaustively, but I can't think of a single case where the resulting work would not be copyrightable.

> There's no issue with this. This isn't the supreme court. Your income is not on the line. It's a code hosting repository. Go to GitHub if it bothers you.

Codeberg is best known as a place for people to go when they're fed up with GitHub. People who are fine with GitHub's various issues wouldn't be looking at Codeberg in the first place, as far as I can tell.

There is GitLab, though. And Forgejo and a bunch of others.

Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

At the start bluesky was actually pretty nice, but now it's just this weird bubble where disagreements don't exist and when I checked out like a month ago there was just so much damn p***.

Nobody has been banned yet, AFAIK. So nobody can answer your second paragraph question. But plenty are choosing to leave.

The judgement you're talking about here ("banned projects don't have human users propostionate...") is going to require evidence? At this point the software community is absolutely full of these tools and people who use them.

If the specific thing banned was projects like that, fine. But that's not what the clause added in the PR said.

> I do not like to build on a foundation that could be ripped away from under my feet at any moment for arbitrary reasons.

Do you only build and publish software in a vacuum running on hardware you own? There is no online community in the western hemisphere that isn't subject to any kind of arbitrariness, be it internal (community, like here) or external (legal or infrastructurally, like on github).

If the outcome is that most vibe-coders leave Codeberg alone, that seems like a win for Codeberg.

"Write" is not the correct verb for how you produce software if you get it from GenAI.

May I suggest a few replacements? "Plagiarize" or "excrete" are both more fitting in different ways.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Ah, the Codeberg Drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034928 - July 2026 (51 comments)

I regret migrating to Codeberg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021856 - July 2026 (474 comments)

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 - July 2026 (144 comments)

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015588 - July 2026 (638 comments)

Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465 - July 2026 (77 comments)

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 - July 2026 (279 comments)

A notable surprise with Bluesky over the past few months is that the anti-AI sentiment has decreased slightly as it becomes harder to argue against impactful use cases.

The low hanging fruit are claude.md, commits co-authored by Copilot, etc.

> Frankly if there's anywhere where I would most like to see AI generated work -- which is frankly based on weights generated from the broad and indiscriminate harvesting of other people's works -- is in copylefted software that takes the distillations of the efforts of the community and makes it available as free software with free software protections.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. We have large corporations stealing work left right and center. Lets utilise that to our benefit and make open and free versions of all software. The crux is that to do that each individual has to pay currency to use this tool. Maybe there is a place for collectives to collect money and to utilise llms to free software. (What strange times we live in.)

A slight aside, open source lived and breathed the idea of ownership of software, be that a council, a handful of committed maintainers, a BDFL and all things in between and adjacent. There isn't really much wrong with "vibe coded" software, the issue seems to be owning that software. Things feels fundamentally more fluid, based on specs and more importantly tests that actually define the features that the software is expected to perform. Not ownership, but more like a contract.

Typical hn comment: xenophobia, hyperbole, wishful thinking, missing the point, cynicism and cheap sarcasm.

You managed to hit all of them. Congrats.

The way I read the article was not that the author disagrees with the concerns you mention, but instead that they believe Codeberg's recent actions fail to address these underlying concerns while adding uncertainty for users of their platform (which they fear will ultimately hurt codeberg). To me, it reads as a call for further discussion and clarification rather than a dismissal.

>Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors.

Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.

That's actually how EU law works! I think it's also why US companies keep getting in trouble here, they try to loophole-lawyer like at home, but it just... doesn't work that way.

I had a whole long conversation about this with another commenter a while ago if you're interested in learning more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697

Not to mention what happens when these rules cease to be rules on purely technical matters. What if they make a rule against the site allowing hosting the code *of* AI agents for example?

Codeberg was competition for the EU, in the topic of tech-sovereignty which is a incredibly hot topic in the EU. With the US abusing it's position not only recently but years past, the EU is accelerating funding and plans to decouple from anything the US can mess with legally. Much of that sentiment has been spreading all over the EU governments and software communities.

GitHub for all its purposes remains a platform hostile to EU interests long term.

Exactly.

> The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.

It is way too arbitrary and open to interpretation and biases.

> sqlite is in the public domain and not copyrightable, for example.

And therefore is not licensable under the GPL; because no license is needed at all. Ardour's goal isn't to be "compatible with" the GPL (in the sense of allowing binaries to be built containing both GPL-licensed code and their own code); their goal is to be covered by the GPL license for the purpose of constraining what actions users can take. This requires the code to be copyrighted, because copyright law is the mechanism that allows them to require users to agree to a license.

1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it.

2. Slippery slope fallacy.

3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2

The big thing I read is Codeberg is for community projects explicitly now, not just your random non-commercial code.

Personal use cases are now “might go unnoticed” and therefore not encouraged. Jeff’s dotfiles repo will probably never have a community, so it’s technically against the rules for some future cleanup initiative.

Most of my repos are random personal projects that are not supporting any larger open source thing, so I couldn’t look at (or recommend Codeberg) as a GitHub alternative for anything but an established project.

I think that’s all an acceptable choice, but it’s not being discussed much.

Spoiled with freedom of association and freedom of speech

You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.

Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable?

Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules?

If not one of the two, what is the reason?

The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.

Banning AI does make them morally better than GitHub yes.

> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow

This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.

    I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

What "shadow group" would that be? The paying members of Codeberg e.V. who voted to pass this motion?

Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?

I don't think they were saying that there aren't reasons to not use github, in or out of the USA, but rather that codeberg was already not a contender for many use cases due to their existing rules restricting private/non-OSS repos.

Yes, and the baseline amount of trust seems to be substantially reduced for Codeberg for a lot of people in the wake of this change relative to most of the other options. I don't even necessarily think the new policy is bad in a vacuum, but if the strongest argument for why you can trust a service is "well can you really trust anyone 100%?", it's hard not to be a little wary.

Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?

Did it get much attention? I don't know of a single person who finds value in LLM generated comments on social platforms. The fact that Codeberg is getting attention for this move is likely because it alienated a part of the community that was previously engaging, enough to generate constructive responses. I didn't see the same thing happening with this HN change.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

It's apples to oranges. No matter how many reasons one has to avoid github, Codeberg is only an alternative for open source hosting.

Are there any alternatives that you could use for closed source development that aren't owned by US entities?

> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.

Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened.

This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.

And also like... this is how literally any community works? You "invest your free time" in it, then you do something that goes against the values of that community... yeah, of course that big bad "shadow group" (in other words, the admins/moderators) is going to do something.

Without additional explanation this reads like flamebait.

I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.

Honestly, for me, both.

While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).

But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.

Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.

And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.

(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)

My read of the "side projects and experiments" part of the blog post is that, in the context of LLM projects, if your project does not use resources and isn't looking to attract a community then, if only due to the practicalities of moderation/enforcement, they're unlikely to take any action against it because it won't be visible or causing enough problems.

If you consider the argument of the comment at the top, that those who disagree with banning will leave. It would seem that you could expect an acceleration.

I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands.

No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.

They won't. No company will, I think the best quote I've heard this week is from the proton CEO on the Decoder podcast.

"No company is going to jail for you."

If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.

That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed.

And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be.

Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.

Flippant maybe, but not bait.

AI is many things, and a moral choice is one of them. Codeberg's stance isn't a moral one as much as a technical one, but there is a very strong argument that the use of AI is inherently immoral.

I really don't understand the argument, to be honest. If somebody is participating in something with a perceived expectation, and then that expectation gets contradicted not once, but twice, why is it unreasonable to assume it might happen again? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely don't understand the line of thinking.

The point is that the stated values of said group changed.

>And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed).

Looking at community conversations, there actually seems to be little clarity over this, and quite a bit of confusion. Several established members of the community seem to be saying that the ToS actually only bans "cryptocurrency related projects" that "[harm] the reputation of Codeberg", and that direct cryptocurrency projects that don't harm Codeberg's reputation are actually allowed, saying that the current banner is a mistake and is in the process of being changed (while they have their own systems and are not on Codeberg, I'm guessing GNU Taler might be an example of a cryptocurrency project that would be allowed). In fact, this appears to be within the official interpretation used when locking the discussion thread on the change ([1] refers to [2]).

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19... [2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...

If they have a coherent set of values, then that's why. Then you have a theory of mind about the admins, and they weren't behaving erratically, but it was your original expectations that were incorrect.

> there is a very strong argument that the use of AI is inherently immoral

Do say more.

I think I agree with you, so maybe you meant to ask someone else? Or you’re just supporting my argument, in which case I appreciate it :-)

> That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated?

I started with a hypothetical. Then I used an actual real-world example. I have 100+ repos on GitHub spanning a wide array of technologies. If I moved all 100+ over, how do I know I won't fall afoul of whatever the community votes to ban next?

The point is Codeberg isn't a good fit for my situation which needs more continuity and less surprises, and that's been made readily apparent now. So I'm leaving, just like many other people who have been posting about it.

Yes, this happens with most communities. It's called growth.

As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines:

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?

Have you considered actually asking someone at Codeberg about your cryptography project?

Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

If the reason is more emotional than rational ("this feels like it's going to change more"), that's okay. Not everything needs to be governed by rigid rules. The Codeberg community knows that well. If in a few years your 100+ repos are still all fine and dandy to their rule set I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.

Is this the "contact our sales team for pricing" of open source?

> Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

Unfortunately you can't make that decision. I have to wait and find out how far the ToS violation will be implemented. Or I just avoid that stress and go somewhere else. Most people being affected seem to be choosing the latter.

> If the reason is more emotional than rational

That's a bit reductive. Risk management always has a level of uncertainty involved. No one makes decisions with 100% certainty in the outcome. Before these votes, I had a certain level of risk assessment in moving off Github To Codeberg that favored Codeberg. Now that situation has changed. It's not "emotional" to recognize that.

It's not analogous at all. I moved my project to codeberg because the values were one way, and GitHub didn't match my values. I pour my heart and soul and time into my project. I also used AI tooling in a fashion as I saw fit. Now I'm reading I'm not welcome -- retroactively -- because I touched "bad" tools.

So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done.

An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.

I'm with you on this. I started moving projects to Codeberg when my understanding of the rules was that it was friendly to FOSS projects. Now it's explicitly unfriendly to a set of FOSS projects (albeit of a kind that I didn't participate in anyway) and users who use a particular kind of tool while working on their otherwise OK FOSS projects.

Now you can have a perfectly legal GPL-licensed project that's not welcome because of the category it finds into or because of its devs' tooling. It's their site and their rules, sure, fine, but it does mean I'm not going to host my policy-compliant projects there. Are they going to get banned next month? Who knows.

To be blunt, I think you may have misunderstood the values to begin with. A motion being passed by a majority is a lagging indicator to the values of the membership, so if they changed they will have changed a long time ago.

The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:

    If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
    Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.

I don't even use Codeberg, and I've understood it was at best wary of AI for years. This shouldn't have come as a shock to you.

[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-a...

This is basically the argument I've seen over and over again from the Codeberg community. Boo hoo, you misunderstood the writing on the wall and now you're stuck doing a bunch of work. Goodbye.

I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so hard to show a little understanding and compassion.

    I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue

What "sort of dialogue" are you referring to?