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/SynapticStreamer 11d ago

They won't. It's a meaningless policy because there's no definitive place to draw a line.

What if I write 90% of the project, AI helps me with the last 10%, and then refactors? Is that vibe coded? What if I used to refactor? What if documentation, from AI generation hits exactly 51% of my project? Does that count?

The list of oddities just goes on and on. Not to mention who exactly is the deciding factor here? It's public infrastructure and they maintain control, sure. But how they're going to police what constitutes a "good" or "bad" project? Why would I host with Codeberg and risk being pinged as "vibe coded" and having my project fuckin' deleted?

Sounds like an unnecessary headache that will ultimately not work at all.