Recently, Codeberg has updated their policy to “restrict LLM-generated content”. This has made a lot of people angry (they also blanket banned cryptocurrency projects, but that one was drowned out by the drama around the LLM part).
Those people are completely missing the point in a way that is just funny.
The Arguments
I have read and have seen multiple arguments, so I’ll try to address the main ones:
“doing this will kill their business”
The answer to that is easy: Codeberg is not a “business”, it’s a non-profit organization that just does stuff for its members. Its members decided to ban AI, so that’s what they do. It’s democracy. The people who are mad about this literally are the problem in the world, Codeberg didn’t do that for any kind of business reason. They did that purely out of principle. This was purely a decision made out of moral principle, which for a lot of (mostly American) techbros is inexcusable, because they don’t understand how someone can make a moral decision (and stand by it) instead of following the money.
And again, this is an organization made to serve its members, so what external people think is irrelevant, they’re not members (and if they disagree, they should have been members).
“doing this isn’t efficient! It will make it so the developers using Codeberg are going to be left being”
The answer to that is: So? Not everyone cares about being the “best” or being “at the top”, some people just want to make stuff, to make stuff. It’s that simple. They don’t care if it’s not the most efficient way, and they don’t even disagree with the fact that it makes you more efficient, they disagree with it morally.
“doing this while saying it’s a fascist technology is doing fascism”
That one is kinda funny, because all the people I’ve read saying that are Americans, a country famous for “not doing fascism” (sarcasm).
A lot of people also took it personally by assuming they were called fascists… which is literally not what they said (though I guess them feeling targeted kinda says something).
But that’s not the point, the point is… they’re not forced to accept you. It’s their platform. It’s their decision. Don’t like it? Host your own or use the dozens of other platforms that welcome AI.
Conclusion
Codeberg has always been human-focused and mostly anti-capitalist. I mean, they even promoted and moved to “Forgejo” a protest-fork (that I disagreed with strongly) made because Gitea became a company (to sustain its development).
Point is: the only people who are surprised (like this guy) have discovered Codeberg a year or so ago (and he did). Codeberg has ALWAYS been morally/politically oriented. None of this is surprising.
In the end, having a reasonably big organization that stands by what they mean (and has a spine) is amazing (and I say that as someone who does use AI for some stuff - but not anything on this blog).