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points by esFran 13 hours ago | 0 comments

I'd recommend the free (as in freedom) Git alternative to everyone: Codeberg. Super lightweight, without that vicious circle of knowing your code is being used to train AI. Free for hobby projects, and reasonably viable for professional ones.

[–] dutchbart 12 hours ago

No, not free as in freedom. LLM-assisted coding is prohibited and everything MUST be open-source. So not viable for all (hobby) projects.

[–] slaymaker1907 8 hours ago

Do they really prohibit all use? My reading of their policy is that they mainly block vibe coding. It doesn't seem like LLM auto-complete or using it to review your code would run afoul of it.

[–] teekert 10 hours ago

Hmm I have my Hugo website there, closed repo and build, in part, with LLMs. Never realized while setting thing up that both are not allowed tbh. I just wanted to not choose GH.

[–] vrighter 12 hours ago

free as in freedom for humans. machines neither want nor need freedom

[–] _heimdall 11 hours ago

That's like saying you're free to build your own shed, as long as you don't use hammers. Hammers don't need nor want freedom.

[–] philipallstar 12 hours ago

Machines are tools used by humans. Codeberg has banned a certain class of tool used by humans.

[–] vrighter 12 hours ago

as is their right, and the wish of a very significant chunk of their users. you're still free to use other platforms.

[–] philipallstar 2 hours ago

I don't know what this means. Is close source software open because you're free to use other software?

[–] r_lee 11 hours ago

"free to use other platforms" doesn't mean that Codeberg is a "free" platform.

might as well say Google is a free Git alternative because you're free to use another one since you can't use it for git

[–] Shish2k 12 hours ago

I wonder how much internet-argument bandwidth would be saved if we used different words for "freedom from" vs "freedom to", instead of putting both things on a single scale and then arguing over which is "more free"...

[–] 1718627440 12 hours ago

It's a matter of perspective and what you perceive to be the default. Freedom from prevention of X is Freedom to not do X.

[–] bheztio 11 hours ago

So if I'm not free to use a hammer, that's actually not a constriction of my freedom because "the hammer neither wants nor needs freedom"?

[–] aabhay 12 hours ago

Speak for yourself

[–] vrighter 12 hours ago

i spoke for nobody. neither myself nor you or anyone else. and machines can't speak or hold opinions, so i can't speak for them either

[–] otabdeveloper4 12 hours ago

Okay, what's the downside tho?

[–] Hendrikto 12 hours ago

Restricting user freedom.

[–] solyin 11 hours ago

Having to wade through piles of human slop.

[–] pixel_popping 10 hours ago

Insecure human slop on top of that. Projects not checked in-depth by AI is recklessness at this point, prove me wrong with an example.

I've found 2 serious vulnerabilities in Librewolf (can crash computer from HTML page, from an iframe) as an example this week, as per their rule, agent isn't allowed to report it, guess we will just have to leave those critical around or wait around that a human discover them while attackers already exploit them in the wild :/

Codeberg doesn't want the world to be secure, quite shady, unless they care to explain what's the downside of discovering critical vulnerabilities with AI, especially automatically? Thinking that humans will write more secure programs than machines is just wrong and shows an outdated and dangerous mindset.

Humans+AI > Humans.

[–] tavavex 6 hours ago

Their ToS only forbids projects that 'mostly consist of code' created with genAI, it says nothing of code that is reviewed through it or projects where it only makes up a small portion of the whole package. The reasons for that are outlined and quite clear - their organization focuses on projects with a certain license and LLM code is in limbo regarding its copyright status.

Basically, unlike your stance, they are rejecting people who are outright saying that AI alone > humans. Which seems to be a popular opinion on HN. Given how angry you are about this, I don't think there's as much separating your opinion from the vibe coders' view as you think there is. I mean, look at this, we're only a few years into LLMs being viable code generators and we already have people accuse them of malice, recklessness and embracing 'human slop' because they dare to have a softball policy on not using this brand new tech absolutely everywhere and for everything. What will the average opinion be like in 2 years? Humans are just bad and can't be trusted to do anything manual at a computer, leave it to the agent?

[–] foolserrandboy 10 hours ago

So they will never have these frequent downtime issues because they will never be bombarded by agents building millions of personal tools with no license applied. Clever.

[–] shiomiru 10 hours ago

Free as in freedom has had a rather specific meaning in software for the past 40+ years, which is "software that matches the Free Software definition." Codeberg runs on Forgejo, whose authors grant you the rights to run, study, modify, and distribute it - unlike GitHub, which is proprietary. (Indeed, there are many Forgejo instances besides Codeberg, it's not just a theoretical benefit.)

It is a ridiculous misinterpretation to assume it means "somebody else will host anything I upload, free of charge", which is of course not the case - not on GitHub either, by the way, their ToS just happens to be more friendly to slop.

(For understandable reasons, too; while M$ is making a killing from selling LLM access & Free Software as training data, the main "benefit" Codeberg sees is getting DDoSed by LLM scrapers 24/7 and vibecoders using up disproportionate amounts of resources.)

[–] raincole 12 hours ago

> that vicious circle of knowing your code is being used to train AI

There is no such circle. If you put your work in public, it has been used to train AI. That's it.

[–] notrealyme123 11 hours ago

And if you put it in private we will never know, but pinky promise. They would never steal training data

[–] aurareturn 13 hours ago

People who migrate away from Github, what makes you think they're more reliable? All Git services are prone to massive surges in commit volume due to AI agents. At least if Github goes down, your boss is not going to blame you.

I'd rather stay in Github and maybe use another service purely as backup.

[–] Lapel2742 12 hours ago

> All Git services are prone to massive surges in commit volume due to AI agents.

You are probably wrong on that.

> 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).

https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

[–] aurareturn 11 hours ago

  You are probably wrong on that.

I don't think I'm. If another Git service gets popular, they too will experience surges and go down often.

If Github truly becomes unreliable and people migrate to this niche service en mass, they'll ignore their no AI coding policy.

[–] chrismorgan 11 hours ago

You missed the rest of the comment, which was to the effect that such AI agents are not allowed on Codeberg. Any abuse at scale will be easily detected and banned.

[–] aurareturn 11 hours ago

How would they know?

Are they going to ban your account based on an algorithm? Are they going to personally check your code? Are they going to scan your code base for AI generated code? How do they define “mostly”?

These seem like insane policies to have a critical business dependent on.

Not only that, their uptimes are still worse than GitHub.

[–] chrismorgan 6 hours ago

I said any abuse at scale. Very good heuristics are quite straightforward, you can then manually check those that are less reliable.

[–] aurareturn 5 hours ago

Manually check? What? You want their staff to check your company's secret code and see if any line was written by Claude?

Come on man.

Heuristics are never 100%. Even a 0.001% error rate is simply unacceptable to businesses.

Imagine being that business that gets banned because their heuristics mistaken you for using AI coding agents.

PS. AI writing code does not have to be in scale. It's not easy to detect.

[–] atiedebee 12 hours ago

Codeberg specifically has a policy against projects that are maintained heavily with AI tooling, so I don't think they would have that problem.

[–] pixelesque 12 hours ago

Their uptime's not exactly great either though:

https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

[–] aurareturn 11 hours ago

Which funny enough is lesser than Github: https://www.githubstatus.com/

I'd much rather stay with Github than a small provider.

[–] Shorel 12 hours ago

Their terms of service forbid AI agents or even AI created code to be submitted there.

[–] aurareturn 10 hours ago

How would they know?

Detect it using an algorithm and automatically ban your business account?

Do people not see how insane that policy is?

[–] Shorel 1 hour ago

I sometimes wonder if any vibe coder has ever coded something manually again.

The world is changing too fast for our laws to adapt. Not to mention for us to adapt.

[–] hagbard_c 12 hours ago

> I'd rather stay in Github and maybe use another service purely as backup.

Swap those two and you're on the right track. I think the best way to use GH is as a mirror for a self-hosted git instance, with or without web frontend. It gives you the reach of GH with the, dare I say it, reliability of self-hosted. It also gives you the chance to keep things off GH which you don't want to be there. Keep the self-hosted instance private for most things, use GH links for public access. When GH is down again you can always give people (temporary) access to your self-hosted instance if the need arrives.

[–] peanut-walrus 11 hours ago

Why exactly do you think public code on Codeberg is not used to train AI? I would assume the opposite...it's unlikely to be Codeberg themselves doing it, but for sure your code is going to be used as training data somewhere.

[–] alpaca128 12 hours ago

TOS are not protection against scraping. Is there any reason to not assume by default that Codeberg gets used for training just like every other online collection of content?

[–] r_lee 11 hours ago

see e.g.: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/commits/branch/master

"This endpoint is seeing a high influx of requests for this repository, to preserve the availability of Codeberg your request will not be processed. Sorry for the inconvenience and please try again later."

[–] _heimdall 11 hours ago

I've had issues recently with CI jobs in codeberg taking quite a bit of time for a runner to pick it up.

This is not a complaint, its a free offering and I appreciate alternatives, but just yesterday I moved one of my open source projects from codeberg to github after waiting 30+ minutes multiple times for CI to start.

[–] roenxi 12 hours ago

Hosted services can't really be "free as in freedom". We can't know for sure what software they're actually running and users don't have any freedom in using their service since that is entirely at their pleasure. For something to be free the thing has to be able to move beyond its present controller.

[–] 1718627440 12 hours ago

Isn't that the case fro AGPL? You have the control over the source code and can change it, even if the current instance is not in your control.

[–] matkoniecz 12 hours ago

Why you think that code from Codeberg is not used to train LLMs?

(You are not required to agree for such use in tos, but it will be used anyway)

(Not by Codeberg operators, to be clear)

[–] Muhammad523 13 hours ago

You're now my friend just because you said "free as in freedom"

[–] PalmPilotProMax 12 hours ago

Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free~~~

[–] mejutoco 12 hours ago

git --bare init

and some discipline can go a long way.

[–] serf 10 hours ago

i'll never defend microsoft, but it irks me to hear the phrase 'free as in freedom' used specifically to describe a service that , as an advertised benefit, restricts user freedom.

no thanks.

I don't have to be pro or against AI to avoid signing a deal with (another) devil.

p.s. : "my code won't be training AI if im on codeberg" is just straight delusion, regardless of their policies.

[–] 1718627440 7 hours ago

"'free as in freedom'" only narrows it down to not refer to the price. It doesn't actually state what you are free from or to.

[–] BoingBoomTschak 12 hours ago

Codeberg has its own issues with anti-scraping measures often impacting (not just annoying) users or some deep ideological bias; and I'm not talking about LLM/open source, which I agree with.

[–] dizhn 12 hours ago

I love and use Forgejo which they are both running and now developing within their ecosystem but development is so slow and such basic things are missing that one cannot help but think perhaps they should get some LLM assistance. At this rate they are very likely to end up a historical footnote.

[–] lexicality 12 hours ago

What's missing?

[–] dizhn 12 hours ago

One example Projects (boards). I would not necessarily call it missing for my own use case but it might as well not exist in its current state.

Label management is a mess too with almost no ease of use features. Lots of clicking when prior art already exists elsewhere.

Federation is another thing that's supposed to happen but isn't.

Action runners I like actually but their web UI is really confusing.

API is missing a lot of endpoints too. (Pretty straight forward for AI agents to work on as "good first issue")

No machine users or management of the same via Administrator. If you want to have a bot (not necessarily AI) you need to create a user with a hard to guess password and manage it by actually logging in as that user.

Another user will probably have their own set of things that matter to them.

As I've already said above, I do use it and love it but sort of half hoped Gitea would have proceeded farther since Forgejo forked away. It hasn't.

OneDev looks much more capable on surface to me today but I have not used it extensively yet and it has some features not included in the self hosted version. Not as much as open core projects but some.