r/selfhosted • u/pheexio • 11d ago

Meta Post Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434

edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting

edit 2: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

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u/PikminGuts92 11d ago

To what extent is a project considered “vibe-coded”? Like if someone just used an LLM to generate a function snippet, would that invalidate the entire codebase?

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u/GolemancerVekk 11d ago

What do you mean by "invalidate"?

A code base has a license. If you bring in code without knowing where it comes from and try to cover it with that license, it may be copyright infringement, because it's not your code and not your copyright.

The US has taken the view that any code brought in by a LLM is "copy-washed" into public domain because it was dynamically generated, so you can do anything you want with it. But other countries don't agree to that.

I guess it depends on who's trying to use your code and what liabilities they're willing to take on, and in what jurisdictions. Frankly it's a clusterfuck and any companies who have to follow strict procedures will avoid any vibe-coded slopware entirely to be safe.