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Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, William Zijl
Thu 23 July 2026
Category:
Contrib
In Brief:
Two motions regarding "artificial intelligence" and Large Language Models (LLMs) were voted on among Codeberg e. V. members and passed.
We are promising to not use any of your data to train LLM and explain what the planned Terms of Use change mean for 'vibe-coded' projects.
We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.
The Codeberg e. V. annual assembly is the meeting that puts power into the hand of our active members. Proposals are discussed live, and later voted on asynchronously.
Since Large Language Models (LLMs) are an emerging but controversial technology, it is not surprising that two of the votes were concerned with Codeberg's position about this technology. The 14-day voting period ended yesterday and both proposals were accepted.
The first vote was a statement about Codeberg e. V.'s stance on using your data to train LLMs.
As stated in our privacy policy, "We do not want to need your data", and this also holds for the use of our user and project data for using or training generative "AI": The Codeberg forge and its associated services are not and will not use the code or data of projects and users to train "Artificial Intelligence" tools such as Large Language Models, whose purpose is to create output modelled after their training input. As an association, we believe that these technologies are incompatible with responsibly creating and maintaining free & open source software.
The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members. It implies a change to our terms of use to prohibit 'vibe-coded projects'. We'll share thoughts about the practical impact at the end of the article.
We all pay for hungry LLMs
LLMs are a very costly technology, and those costs keep rising as the companies providing them have to start recouping their investments. They are not only costly for those who use and explicitly subscribe to these services. The costs are not only hidden in 'normal' cloud and service subscriptions that cross-finance the 'innovative new features' you never asked for. LLMs are so costly that companies externalize the costs on a massive scale - on those who don't use them and society at large. Increased hardware prices, energy use and environmental damage - we all pay for it!
Strained servers due to nonsensical crawling
In past posts we have already outlined how our infrastructure at Codeberg is regularly put under heavy load from webcrawlers of those companies who plan to ingest all of the code that is hosted on Codeberg for training their LLMs.
At Codeberg, we are happy to provide free and open access to code. Just run git clone and enjoy.
Unfortunately, these crawlers instead try to read every single page from Codeberg, no matter if it makes sense. This includes all the different issue filter variants, Git history, as well as the actual files at any point in Git history - even if they are still equal.
These needless accesses create expensive database queries that diminish the service quality for all of us, requires substantial amounts of work from our system administrators, and force us to spend time building defensive mechanisms instead of cool new stuff. Mechanisms that also affect new and existing legitimate users, as we're having to impose limits or outright blocks on their desired workflow; leaving them a worse experience with Codeberg.
The development team of none
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.
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Hardware sourcing is...