--- title: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News description: Codeberg e.V. members voted on two motions regarding LLMs, both of which passed. The organization commits to never using user or project data to train LLMs,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms-codeberg-news-zsvzegq84 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News | daily.dev og:description: Codeberg e.V. members voted on two motions regarding LLMs, both of which passed. The organization commits to never using user or project data to train LLMs,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms-codeberg-news-zsvzegq84 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/zsvZeGQ84.png og:image:alt: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Codeberg e.V. members voted on two motions regarding LLMs, both of which passed. The organization commits to never using user or project data to train LLMs, and is updating its Terms of Use to discourage or prohibit 'vibe-coded' projects — those created primarily by LLM agents with little human oversight. The post outlines the reasoning: LLM crawlers strain Codeberg's infrastructure, AI-driven hardware demand has caused SSD prices to jump from €700 to €3,700, and vibe-coded ghost projects consume disproportionate resources. Beyond infrastructure, Codeberg argues LLMs erode trust in the FLOSS ecosystem by flooding maintainers with low-effort AI-generated contributions, enabling license laundering of copyleft code, and replacing collaborative community software with unmaintained single-use code. Informal enforcement guidelines are provided: active community projects and those with pre-LLM history are largely unaffected, while fully autonomous LLM-generated projects or those with resource usage far exceeding what their contributors could produce by hand may no longer be welcome. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 80 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-07-24). **TL;DR:** The community is divided: some applaud Codeberg's principled stance against LLM-generated code slop and appreciate the democratic process, while others criticize the vague, hard-to-enforce ToS language, the disconnect between the blog post's rationale and the actual rule added, and the chilling effect on legitimate projects that use AI tools responsibly. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 35% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Hosting LLM-generated slop wastes Codeberg's limited donation-funded resources on projects with no real community or users. - A no-LLM-slop policy could make Codeberg a meaningful signal of human-crafted, community-maintained software. - The decision was made democratically by active members, and membership is open to anyone who applies. - Codeberg publicly stating and standing by values is seen as a healthy contrast to the silent enshittification of other platforms. **The pushback** - The ToS text added is disconnected from the blog post's rationale, citing copyright and harmful code rather than the community/resource arguments made in the post. - The rule is vague and selectively enforced, risking arbitrary or politically motivated takedowns rather than consistent application. - Legitimate, serious projects that use LLMs as one tool among many (e.g. MapLibre, Ghostty) are effectively excluded or chilled from joining. - The ban on cryptocurrency projects alongside this move signals an expanding political litmus test that makes Codeberg unreliable as neutral infrastructure. - The ToS language itself contains grammatical errors and was apparently not proofread before being voted on by 400+ members. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): HN commenters are split between those who accept the democratic legitimacy of the vote and those who left or plan to leave Codeberg over the vague, moralism-driven enforcement and hostile community atmosphere around the debate. - lobsters (mixed): Lobsters discussion is substantive and critical, with the most-upvoted comments praising the intent but raising serious concerns about the disconnect between the blog post's reasoning and the actual ToS text, enforcement ambiguity, and the chilling effect on legitimate LLM-assisted projects. **Hottest debate:** Whether the ToS ban is a principled community values statement with reasonable enforcement discretion, or an unenforceable, vague rule that will be weaponized arbitrarily against projects Codeberg's members happen to dislike. **Open questions** - How will Codeberg distinguish between 'mostly LLM-generated' and 'LLM-assisted' projects in practice, given no clear threshold is defined? - Will the expanding political scope of bans (LLMs, crypto) continue, and where does it stop? - Does a project with a real community and responsible LLM use have any recourse if reported under this rule? - Why does the ToS cite copyright status and harmful code as justifications when the blog post doesn't mention either? **Highlights** > I'm concerned by how disconnected this blog post is from the text that's been added to Codeberg's terms of service. The blog post makes several points about the costs that LLMs impose on society and ways that LLMs discourage collaboration. Of those points, I found this one to be the most convincing justification for banning LLM-generated code on Codeberg: > Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. We are a place for people to collaborate and improve software together. Within this context, the recent votes can be understood as a reconfirmation of those principles: As we want to center on human collaboration, we will not actively support or engage in the creation of LLMs and will not put our limited resources to use for storing single-use software that would pollute our FLOSS commons. But then I followed [the link](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff879366d59bf1af54080c2) in the very last sentence of the blog post and read what they've added to the ToS: > You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as *Claude*, *OpenAI Codex*). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5). Those are entirely different points, and neither one is so much as mentioned by the blog post: the words "copyright" and "harm" do not appear in it. I suppose the copyright point is somewhat self evident, but the claim that LLM-generated code is more likely to be harmful is anything but. I'm also surprised that the ToS entry seems not to have been proofread. It should say "Such projects have" instead of "Such projects having", "'generative AI'-tools" shouldn't be hyphenated, and it's inconsistent to write "OpenAI Codex" but not "Anthropic Claude". The text is fine as a first draft, but it makes me wary of Codeberg's governance that it went to a vote of over 400 people and got added to their terms of service without being revised. > — [tchebb on lobsters · 14 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/ax914v/protecting_our_floss_commons_from_llms#c_fcud3e) > I'm like as anti-AI as you can get, but I'm not sure how they think this will play out. They basically said "slop is banned, but we can't go after all LLM use that would be absurd" Without clear rules that can and will be enforced, it will just become a game of who like or dislikes who... > — [conartist6 on lobsters · 11 points, 4 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/ax914v/protecting_our_floss_commons_from_llms#c_tzxerb) > > If your work fits into these cases, it is unlikely that you are affected at all: > - Projects who have an active community that cares about and maintains the software What the authors of this post don't seem to realize is that it is possible to care about software while maintaining and developing it with the help of LLMs. Case in point is [MapLibre](https://codeberg.org/maplibre). We ported one project to Codeberg, but the maintainer makes heavy use of LLMs for development. So we have to close that repo again. I am also thinking of a project like [Ghostty](https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github). Another serious project that wants to leave GitHub, but cannot move to Codeberg now. This move by Codeberg is an effective ban on all LLM usage, because the rule is very vague and even the guidelines in this blog post are contradictory. No open source community with even a slightly liberal policy on LLM use is going to risk having their community booted off Codeberg. > — [louwers on lobsters · 4 points, 3 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/ax914v/protecting_our_floss_commons_from_llms#c_nhktfk) > I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one. Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this. I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed. It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly. I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things. But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on. Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them] Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://scholar.social/@silvermoon82@wandering.shop/11696402... "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community." Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith." Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former. As is pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope. ... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display: [I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking. The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools. The > — [cmrdporcupine on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019881) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635) · 20 points · 32 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/ax914v/protecting_our_floss_commons_from_llms) · 84 points · 48 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency And LLM-Generated Code Projects](https://daily.dev/posts/codeberg-bans-cryptocurrency-and-llm-generated-code-projects-xpmc5ypwv) · Hackaday · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The people vs the AI overlords](https://daily.dev/posts/the-people-vs-the-ai-overlords-kduxszp2n) · Planet Python · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source](https://daily.dev/posts/how-vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source-xc0nz3mk2) · Hackaday · 277 upvotes · 50 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms-codeberg-news-zsvzegq84) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms-codeberg-news-zsvzegq84","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms-codeberg-news-zsvzegq84"},"datePublished":"2026-07-23T04:47:54.460Z","dateModified":"2026-07-24T02:18:51.457Z","description":"Codeberg e.V. members voted on two motions regarding LLMs, both of which passed. 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