Codeberg Is Deciding Which Technologies Belong

In Protecting Our FLOSS Commons From LLMs, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl explain Codeberg’s decision to prohibit projects created or maintained primarily through LLMs.

“We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.”

This is not Codeberg’s first attempt to exclude an entire category of technology. Its community was debating a stand against cryptocurrency and blockchain projects as far back as November 2022. Bitcoin software, wallets, blockchain applications, and unrelated open-source infrastructure were all pulled into a discussion largely motivated by scams, environmental concerns, and the reputation of the broader crypto industry.

The new LLM policy was approved by Codeberg’s active members with 358 votes in favor, 144 against, and 14 abstentions. It does not prohibit every project that contains AI-assisted code. Codeberg says established projects, active communities, ordinary projects accepting some LLM contributions, and small experiments are unlikely to be affected.

Instead, it may reject autonomous agent projects, software written or maintained predominantly by LLMs, projects consuming disproportionate storage or CI resources, and projects closely tied to the LLM ecosystem. There will be no automatic scanner or immediate mass deletion, leaving enforcement largely to human judgment.

I understand not wanting to subsidize abandoned repositories, generated garbage, abusive CI workloads, crypto scams, or code that nobody understands well enough to maintain. Codeberg is a nonprofit funded by members and donations, and its resources are limited.

But Codeberg already has measurable storage quotas and a process for projects that need additional resources. Wasteful CI, missing licenses, abandoned projects, fraudulent software, and maintainers who cannot explain their own code can all be addressed directly.

Banning or discouraging broad categories such as cryptocurrency, blockchain, LLM projects, and “vibe-coded” software replaces technical standards with ideological judgment. A Bitcoin wallet is not automatically a scam. A carefully reviewed AI-assisted project is not the same as an unattended agent dumping thousands of files into a repository.

It feels like clanker energy aimed at the tools rather than the people misusing them.

Codeberg has every right to define the community it wants to operate. Developers should simply understand that it is not a neutral Git forge or a direct replacement for GitHub. It is a curated commons whose members decide not only whether a project is free software, but increasingly whether they approve of the technology and process used to create it.

I would rather judge software by its license, maintainability, security, resource usage, and whether a human is willing to understand and stand behind it.

Read Protecting Our FLOSS Commons From LLMs and the earlier Codeberg discussion, Taking a Stand Against Cryptocurrency/Blockchain.