The Codeberg Fracture is Good Actually

Codeberg, a German non-profit association operating a code forge for free and open-source software, recently held a passing member vote on including the following language to their terms of use:

7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

This has, unsurprisingly, led to a lot of opinions. I'm not particularly interested in hashing out the opinions here, they're about what you'd expect. People who agree with the policy change on one side, people who disagree doing the usual straw-man arguments about censorship and freedom.

Here is what I do find valuable though: Regardless of the details of this disagreement, the fact that there is disagreement, and that folks are finding out Codeberg won't cater to everyone is a good thing.

The web is never at its best when it becomes increasingly centralized. That was true when code-hosting increasingly got eaten up by GitHub, and as much as I believe in the intentions of the people behind Codeberg, the same would be true if they became a significant portion of the market. It is categorically a mistake for us to look for the place to move to, which is exactly why it's great that Codeberg is signaling that, for some people, they will not be the right solution.

To all the LLM boosters who are upset by Codeberg's decision, I sincerely hope you spin up an LLM-code-first forge. A place where LLM contributions are welcomed with opened arms and celebrated. Bring the options you want to see to the market.

Because no matter how much I personally agree with one side or the other here, above all else, I want to see the web flourish again. Bring on 10, 50, 100 new code forges, let people host where they want. And indeed, thanks to the power of git, we can host on all of them at the same time if we want!

That is the kind of redundancy, decentralization, and fun that the web longs for.