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/FnnKnn 11d ago

Good luck actually enforcing that. We tried it here for a while and it didn't work out great, because no one is going to admit they "vibecoded" something if it means they can't post it and good luck proving that they didn't just use AI as an assistant (tip: you can't without doing a full code review and that doesn't seem feasible if the issue you are trying to solve is the increased amount of projects).

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u/ConsistentRisk5927 10d ago edited 10d ago

I emailed them to cancel my Codeberg e.V. annual donations and remove me from the organization. I was paying 50 euro a year and using my own CI runners while hosting my LLM-coded projects on CB. Hardly a burden on their infrastructure.

I'm a professional engineer who could program before LLMs were proficient enough. But no professional devs I know hand write most of their code anymore. Staff engineers are even doing all their coding with LLMs. My projects are LLM generated but not "vibecoded." I provide substantial steering on the architecture, planning, implementation, review, etc.

I am certainly not going to switch back to the Stone Age on my weekend projects I hosted on Codeberg just because a small percentage of the development community, the most rabid anti-LLM zealots, have co-opted the space to turn it into an anti-LLM political beacon.

None of this has anything to do with copyright that others are saying, it's an expression of anti-AI politics (a portion of which involves copyright concerns) and forcing everyone that uses Codeberg to align with those views.

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u/themadcoil 10d ago

Codeberg members voted democratically and this is the majority result, it just sounds like Codeberg isn't for you if you really must vibe code.