[olalonde]

It would be cool if they just admitted that this is ideologically motivated rather than hide behind pragmatic excuses.

1) "unclear copyright status"

Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.

2) "little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code"

Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).

[marginalia_nu]

> Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.

If their mission is Free Software in some Stallman-adjacent interpretation of the idea, then it is actually quite a legitimate concern. The problem isn't that the code is illegal to possess, but that it's not Free Software, since that is entirely based on a licensing copyrighted code, and since there is legal precedent saying LLM outputs can't be copyrighted in many jurisdictions, it's highly debatable if it can be given a Free Software license.

[olalonde]

Agreed that it would potentially be a bigger concern but it seems they support both "Free Software" and "Open Source". See my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004912

[lionkor]

> fully protected under safe harbor laws

Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.

> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).

Based on what? So if I set up a markov chain and generate a couple ten thousand lines of python code, and somehow got it to run, you'd say it's safer than human code? What about low quality local LLMs? Where is the line that says that automatically (not quite "randomly") generated code has less issues than human-generated code?

Harmful code does not mean purposefully harmful, it could simply be accidental (like when an agent goes "hm, an instance is already running, let's ensure that doesn't happen" and adds a `pkill -9 myprogram` invocation to a script, unknowingly killing all processes that contain the word `myprogram`). It could also be code that claims to do one thing, but does another, or one that ends up logging auth keys, etc.

I have had SOTA models do all of the above. Not sure about more or less likely than human code, but since LLMs can generate thousands of lines per hour, that tips the scales.

[bxff]

> Harmful code does not mean purposefully harmful, it could simply be accidental (like when an agent goes "hm, an instance is already running, let's ensure that doesn't happen" and adds a `pkill -9 myprogram` invocation to a script, unknowingly killing all processes that contain the word `myprogram`). It could also be code that claims to do one thing, but does another, or one that ends up logging auth keys, etc.

> I have had SOTA models do all of the above. Not sure about more or less likely than human code, but since LLMs can generate thousands of lines per hour, that tips the scales.

I'd be willing to wager that SOTA models are far less likely to write harmful code than random human beings. Models are far less likely to make mistakes as they continuously keep getting better, while every human may differ in their abilities at writing 'good' code.

[olalonde]

> Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.

Who is sending all those takedown requests on vibe coded repos? My guess is that this is absolutely not an issue that they actually have.

> Based on what?

LLMs produce buggy code. Humans do too. Like you mentioned, it's difficult to say one is categorically worse than the other since both humans and LLMs vary so much. By "less likely" I was just thinking about the fact that LLMs often refuse to intentionally produce harmful code.

Anyways, my point was that this is just a pretext. If by some objective measure they discovered that vibe coded repos were less likely to contain "harmful code", do you really think they would enact the opposite policy (e.g. ban non vibe coded projects)? Don't think so.

[surgical_fire]

They are ideologically motivated towards open source software.

That means that they are ideologically motivated about the open source license being enforceable.

Just because you have ulterior motives, it doesn't mean others do. Codeberg is pretty clear on their stance.

> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).

Right now this is unclear, based on personal experience. I am totally fine with using AI tools, but I do review every line of code it spits out.

It's fair to take a safe approach and favor human oversight.

[olalonde]

I don't think they have ulterior motives because I do, I think that because of the loaded language they use (e.g. "taking a stand against AI", "LLM-extrusions") and the dubious reasons they came up with.

It's been decided pretty much everywhere that LLM output is not copyrighted by the LLM vendor. The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).

[surgical_fire]

> The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).

I don't think that's settled. For the time being it's fair to be on the safe side.

Either way, if it irks you that they chose this stance, you can just not use Codeberg. They are not the only game in town.

[QuixoticNap]

I have mixed feelings about this. However, if this is due to ideological reasons against LLMs then they'd have no reason to hide it considering their community. I think the copyright concern is genuine, especially since Codeberg is European.