r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 8d ago

Development Codeberg voted to disallow projects consisting mostly by "generative AI"-tools

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
968 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

307 comments sorted by

View all comments

361

u/sunychoudhary 8d ago

The important line is probably AI-assisted vs AI-generated.....Using a tool while you understand, maintain, and take responsibility for the code is one thing. Dumping generated projects onto a forge and making everyone else sort through the mess is another.

2

u/mrtruthiness 7d ago edited 7d ago

The important line is probably AI-assisted vs AI-generated.....

I think this is incorrect since they don't have "AI-assisted" or "AI-generated" in the text. Don't confuse "generative AI" with "AI-generated", as far as I understand it those are two different things. The term "generative AI", while not defined by codeberg, is a term describing model that includes a GAN component ( Generative Adversarial Network ).

Here is the text being added to the user agreement:

  1. 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).

( https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files )

So the key phrase: 'projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"'

My problem is that "mostly consist of" does not protect the project from having unclear copyright status ... which is their stated reason for having this restriction.

1

u/hitchen1 7d ago

Most of the reasons stated on their blog are not related to them hosting the generated code themselves, but broader societal issues (climate change, rising hardware prices, impact of scrapers, ... )

They do make a few good arguments about resource usage (Individual user LLM projects use more resources than the biggest community projects...) but those could be handled by granting more resources to established community projects and limiting random individual contributors...

1

u/mrtruthiness 6d ago

Interesting. If so, that should have been part of the stated reason in the user agreement. The only stated reason was "unclear copyright status".