written on July 24, 2026
Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Considering I want GitHub to get some competition I have thoughts about this.
GitHub’s governance has never been democratic and there is plenty about the platform that I dislike. Yet I do not need my infrastructure to be democratic but I need it to be predictable and reasonably neutral towards the Open Source software hosted on it. A democratic provider without a clear constitution can be worse at those things than a corporation is.
Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do run the platform like they want. It is a German association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But a democratic vote says nothing about whether the decision is a good one, particularly for the people already depending on the platform. A majority can still decide that certain projects and people no longer belong.
The new terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. That’s fine, but these days I could not assign authorship percentages to my recent projects. For me this rule is quite vague and I would bet that it makes it hard to enforce. In practice my assumptoin is that the center will leave.
If anything a harsher line would probably be preferable. If Codeberg wants no LLM involvement, it should say so. On the other hand if the objection is just spam and abusive resource consumption, it should write rules for those instead. Now it defers the details of the policy to moderators and the communit which already draws a much harder boundary than the text does, judging by the tone of the discussion around it.
It is a shame that the Open Source and Free Software communities are splitting this deeply over LLMs and agents. These systems have problems, 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. More importantly, LLMs if used well, should be welcome to the Open Source community as they can be used to reclaim control and take power away from large corporations.
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 entity. As a European project, Codeberg naturally matters to me even more. I just wish Codeberg were more forward-looking here and be willing to host the Open Source software of tomorrow and not only software approved by the community today.