In Brief: Two motions regarding

In Brief:

  • Two motions regarding “artificial intelligence” and Large Language Models (LLMs) were voted on among Codeberg e. V. members and passed.
  • We are promising to not use any of your data to train LLM and explain what the planned Terms of Use change mean for ‘vibe-coded’ projects.
  • We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

The blog/news post then goes extensively into where Codeberg understands itself to be in the development landscape, and their voting results. They present their interpretation of the current software development and hardware landscape under the influence of LLMs, and the consequences they take. And how it changes not only development in general, but FOSS collaboration and projects specifically.

To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

  • Kissaki@programming.devOPEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    Unfortunately, these crawlers instead try to read every single page from Codeberg, no matter if it makes sense. This includes all the different issue filter variants, Git history, as well as the actual files at any point in Git history - even if they are still equal.

    I’m surprised they don’t lock some things behind account logins. Is it that hard to decide what would be acceptable to no longer serve without an account?

    Does the full commit and change history have to be available without an account, under these circumstances? If we think about what would be minimally enough:

    • Current branch head tree
    • Tag trees (you can link to release source state and [potentially/manually] compare between releases)

    Not having a change log history nor code change diff seems like a big loss to me, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and that seems acceptable to me.

    To me, Codeberg is in a better position to do so than smaller instances. I already have an account because it has many [relevant/significant] projects, is a home of public good, and is under an appropriate org.

    • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      24 hours ago

      I’m surprised they don’t lock some things behind account logins. Is it that hard to decide what would be acceptable to no longer serve without an account?

      From this most recent event, such a policy would probably need to be proposed and voted on, if the voting members of Codeberg want it that way.

      The way I read their post, it’s doing double duty: the first is the announcement of the ToS changes. The second is laying out their overall position, because – by their own words – LLMs are controversial and with this announcement, they are pushed into a discussion where not everyone is on the same page. Should the LLM problem continue to get worse for Codeberg, their post is fair warning that future measures might be proposed and voted on. No one should believe that the two ToS changes alone have fully mitigated the LLM problem for Codeberg.

      And I think that goes exactly to their point about communities: Codeberg fosters human communities, unlike LLMs that embody nothing, and GitHub that is commercial with a free tier. If something is going to change, it will be by community discussion and decision. In that sense, their radical transparency is exceptional.

  • Kissaki@programming.devOPEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    It’s somewhat long for two policy changes, but a very well-written, wide assessment. It lays out good reasons for the [further restricting] changes.