Codeberg Divides | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

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Codeberg Divides

written on July 24, 2026

Codeberg recently changed its<br>terms to<br>exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want<br>GitHub to face competition I have thoughts.

Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with<br>members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But<br>democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is<br>inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A<br>majority can still decide that certain projects and people no longer belong.

GitHub’s governance has never been democratic and there is plenty about the<br>platform that I dislike. Yet democracy is not the main property I need from<br>infrastructure. I need it to be predictable, dependable, and reasonably<br>neutral towards the legal Open Source software hosted on it. A democratic<br>provider without a clear constitution can be worse at those things than a<br>corporation.

The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit<br>projects that<br>mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed<br>codebase, what does "mostly" mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably<br>assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is<br>open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable. In practice<br>the center will probably lose out, as it has a bias.

A harsher line would probably be preferable. If Codeberg wants no LLM<br>involvement, it should say so. If it wants to prevent autonomous repository<br>spam and abusive resource consumption, it should write rules for those instead.<br>The current middle ground delegates too much of the policy to moderators and<br>community norms. I’m currently assuming the community around it draws a much<br>harsher social boundary, making projects and maintainers unwelcome even when<br>they technically comply.

It is a real shame that the Open Source and Free Software communities are<br>splitting this deeply over LLMs and agents. There are serious questions about<br>copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated<br>contributions. But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made.<br>The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not<br>just divide into camps. More importantly, LLMs if done and used well, should be<br>welcome to all of us. They could be used to reclaim control and power, away<br>from large corporations and institutions.

As I mentioned before, I want GitHub to face true competition in the Open Source<br>space. I would particularly like some of it to come from associations rather<br>than another large corporation. As a European project, Codeberg naturally<br>matters to me even more. It can choose to be a smaller community with a<br>stronger political identity, but that is a different ambition from being a broad<br>and dependable European alternative to GitHub.

I wish Codeberg were more forward-looking here: willing to host the Open Source<br>software of tomorrow, not only software made in the ways its community approves<br>of today. It has every right to make the choice it made, but I just do not think it<br>is a good one.

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ai,<br>open-source and<br>thoughts

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