GoKawiilA brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
My primary reason for leaving GitHub was not about a single feature or a single outage, but about the “enshittification” of the platform under Microsoft’s ownership. The web interface got rewritten into a sluggish pile of JavaScript that either broke things which used to just work, or made them so horribly slow that using them became a PITA. Beyond the technical decay GitHub had turned into de facto “public infrastructure” in much the same way that WhatsApp has, hosting the source code of a very large share of the world’s software and, through that, giving Microsoft a degree of leverage and surveillance over everyone’s projects, and by extension everyone’s digital lives, that no single company should hold. On top of that, stories about legitimate developers losing their accounts due to arbitrary bans by Microsoft only reinforced the feeling that it would be a good idea to at least have a backup somewhere else.
Codeberg looked like a viable alternative. It offered free and open-source projects a reputable home and, more importantly, an equally free one, run by a non-profit association rather than a subsidiary of the largest software vendor on the planet. Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.
Human stupidity
Every project I’ve published so far was built with 100% human stupidity rather than “artificial intelligence”, or, more accurately, LLMs. I don’t hold particularly strong feelings about Codeberg banning projects that are predominantly LLM-driven, at least not feelings as strong as the ones I hold about the simultaneous ban of legitimate cryptocurrency projects, which reads as though it got lumped in for no reason other than that most people still remember the villain-du-jour that crypto was in the years before LLMs took that title. The two clauses landed within days of each other, the LLM prohibition on the 29th of June and the cryptocurrency prohibition on the 2nd of July, both as Assembly 2026 proposals, and the terms now file the latter under, of all things, “content that harms the reputation of Codeberg”, which sounds like legalese for “we don’t have a solid reason or an actual number of bad precedents to categorically ban it”.
The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:
Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
And, a little further down, it says:
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows, and the only cOmMuNiTy they have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time not contributing in any form whatsoever. I’ve been publishing silly little tools for decades, predating this website and even GitHub itself (remember when SourceForge was the hot sh.t?), and not one of them has ever had an actual “community” around it, at least not in the romanticized sense that Codeberg paints in that post. I’m a lone wolf who codes everything by hand and spends an absurd amount of time doing exactly that, and the notion that an LLM is the thing separating a real project with a real community from a fake one does not hold up once you look at how the average useful little tool on any forge comes to exist in the first place.
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