Codeberg was all over the tech news for a week or two this summer, after members voted to amend the terms of service to prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by “generative AI”-tools. The debate that followed was surprisingly heated. I’m one of the majority of members who voted in favour of the amendment and I was really happy to see it pass.
The level of outrage about it surprised me, to be honest. And don’t get me wrong, I definitely understand disagreeing with the decision itself. It’s going against the biggest industry trend most of us have ever experienced. But there was a level of anger on display that seemed out of place. Some of the reaction went well beyond disagreement into open contempt, with prominent YouTubers mocking Codeberg representatives as though they’d somehow forgotten that both the policy and the leadership team are the result of democratic votes by the membership.
I think a lot of the critique is missing something important: AI coding tools are incredibly polarising. Anyone who either loves that stuff or (like me most weekdays) just uses whatever tools their employer has chosen is already set. GitHub is all-in on Copilot and all the venture-backed forges have similarly AI-centric product strategies. But until the policy change at Codeberg, nobody was overtly making space for the other cohort: your activists and skeptics who actively dislike all the AI stuff. Not every forge has to make the same trade-offs. In fact, I think the ecosystem is healthier if they don’t.
Now thanks to the new policy there’s at least one major forge where contributors can reasonably assume they’re mostly dealing with human-written code. That’s a really useful assumption to be able to make. It fundamentally changes how you read code and interpret commits. I think it’s very valuable to ensure it’s still possible to have access to that assumption somewhere. Given GitHub’s own claims about the breakneck acceleration of machine-generated code, the whole open source commons seemed headed for an LLM monoculture in the absence of something like the Codeberg policy change.
Having seen how readily the idea of “diversity of opinion” is deployed in defence of the status quo regarding problems like racism or sexism within our industry, I have to admit it came as something of a surprise to see the concept so conspicuously absent from the commentary here. There’s nothing irrational or malicious about wanting one place that’s a little different.
I think it’s great that Codeberg will continue to be a mostly human place. Even a professional forklift driver might choose to lift weights at the gym, after all. I’m very proud of the outcome of the vote and I’m excited to get back involved with some Forgejo work after the summer.