And what do you think “concerns over licensing” means? 🤦

You realized that those parts refer to two different things? But since you clearly live in a world entirely detached from reality I don’t think this makes sense to discuss further.

Yes, that’s why they put up a big banner informing everyone after they decided on the ToS change.

I really get the feeling there are a bunch of people here commenting that have never visited Codeberg even once 🤦

It is not. There are plenty of studies showing that LLMs spit out code that is near verbatim to existing code and LLM companies even go so far as to instruct their models to not also add the corresponding license/copyright headers with that code.

There are probably law firms analysing common code patterns LLMs often use right now and are approaching copyright holders of similar enough code to buy up the rights. It might not all stand up in court, but it will be enough to scare some people into settling for fee that guarantees a profit for these law firms. This is a tried and true method for an entire industry of law firms.

At this point I must assume you are trolling 🤦

It is a totally different thing to have the occasional copyright take down request from a legitimate copyright holder, or hosting code that is in the majority likely copyright infringing and just waiting for someone to start targeting for mass copyright litigation.

No, these malicious law firms intentionally go after the small fish, who are much more likely to be intimidated and give in to a settlement payment before it even reaches the courts.

And for Codeberg it makes absolutly sense to minimize the issue for them now before it becomes an even bigger issue.

What hasn’t happened? Sure, this isn’t wide spread yet, but it also took malicious law firms a while before they realized going after p2p torrent users is a lucrative business.

And I seem to have a much better grasp at copyright than you do.

It is still a parody project 🤷

You are linking to a parody project 🤦

And you are also misunderstanding my point. Yes the cat is out of the bag and companies will absolutely copyright wash their codebases like that, but they have big legal teams to defend against copyright trolls and generally do not publish most of their code base for anyone to see.

Small hobbyist open-source projects that make up near 100% of the projects hosted on Codeberg on the other hand are easy marks for malicious litigation, just like home users torrenting movies were in the 1990ties and early 2000.

You are still not understanding the issue.

LLMs cause a lot of people to unknowingly violate copyright, and those people then become easy targets for malicious copyright litigation. And Codeberg is caught in the middle of that and doesn’t want to be involved in the resulting mass legal cases because they are just a small volunteer organisation without a legal team.

And Codeberg’s explanation is very clear that is isn’t a blanket ban on LLM generated code for “purity” reasons. It is a risk mitigation strategy against projects that are mostly LLM generated.

Yes, they can upload copyrighted stuff, but people typically don’t do so on large scale and when they knowingly do it these days they typically try to hide their tracks well enough that law firms know it will not be a lucrative business to try and blackmail them.

And one of Codeberg’s main points is the unknown copyright status, you just failed to understand it.

You are missing the point entirely. LLMs regularly generate code that is a near verbatim copy of existing copyrighted code, but with almost no way for the LLM using person to notice that. LLMs being sufficiently transformative might be an argument about the use of training material, making the resulting model not a copyright violation itself, and thus might protect the companies that produce and offer these models, but it says nothing about the actual output of a model.

It is only a question of time before some enterprising law firm decides to mass scan open-source projects and weaponize their findings similar to patent trolls or file-sharing legal threats. This has a long history in Germany where Codeberg is located, and even if a court rules that the host itself is only responsible for removing such copyright violating code, it will require significant effort to do so with constant legal fights as the attacking lawyers will try to figure out the identity of the person responsible so that they can blackmail them with cease and desist legal fees.

Politics will not care about some hobbyist open-source projects and large companies will spend a lot of effort to obfuscate their code to prevent this legal trolling to affect them.

something nobody ever told you about

Other than it being explained in big letters on the very front page of Codeberg?

It was a lenghty process with their members voting on both ToS changes. Just because you only hear from it now, doesn’t mean it was “made rather rapidly”.

And the ambiguity is necessary to prevent overburdening the moderators. This isn’t some legal code with a well funded state apparatus behind it.

Why would you, unless you are a member of Codeberg e.V. with voting rights? If you just use a gratis account on their platform, then you are just a guest they tollerate as long as you don’t become too smelly.

If the hard legal reality of all LLM generated code having a high risk of breaking copyright is “feelings” for you, then sure 🙄

It’s fairly easy indeed and works well: https://joinjabber.org/tutorials/service/unifiedpush/

Although you could just install the Slidge.im Matrix gateway and ditch ElementX all together.

It’s not prejudice if it is objectively true 🤷

Most LLM users don’t try to hide it and the commit pattern is a result of the LLM assisted workflow, thus without losing the perceived benefits of using LLMs it can not be easily hidden. And the pattern isn’t only about when but also what. You might be oblivious to it, but the pattern is very clear and not possible to mistake with regular code writing patterns in an overall project. It is harder to spot in individual smaller PRs though, but that isn’t what Codeberg’s new policy is targeting.

And anyways, this isn’t a question of “wrong-think”, but simply of Codeberg not wanting to be associated with such low quality, likely copyright violating and resource hogging projects. The LLM using people have plenty of other code forges to use, so it is really a non-issue 🤷

No need to assume that. Just by using LLMs to assist with code writing, the human in the loop changes their commit pattern.