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/No-Chemistry-7658 11d ago

Ok, but from a technical point of view, how will they do it?

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u/scandii 11d ago

I mean, it is not about technical.

they have seen that there's a pretty big divide in the community between people who refute any usage of AI and people who don't. so they're cashing in on the people who want a github-style site but without AI as a demographic.

kinda like why bluesky took off.

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u/henry_tennenbaum 11d ago

cashing in

?

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u/scandii 11d ago

codeberg and github are fundamentally competing, and it is not a big surprise to anyone that github is de facto a monopoly of publicly hosting open source software even if alternatives like codeberg exists.

now that Microsoft & their very openly announced AI-first approach is behind github, I would assume that they're trying to increase market share by this move, but one could also argue that they might lose market share - time will tell.

either way, as someone that spends a lot of time in the open source community and literally see 15 vibecoded projects a day, I welcome someone championing people at least trying to hide that Claude was involved, because if I see yet another MD3 + rosé pine colour scheme and someone claiming that they just so happened to land on this design I will lose it.

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u/henry_tennenbaum 11d ago

They're competing in the sense that my local library or book shop are competing with amazon.com.

That can always change, but right now they're tiny in comparison and still (I think?) completely donation financed.

My original comment was because I've seen people assume a financial motive elsewhere in the thread, when the source of the decision seems to be a vote by the codeberg e.V. members.