Article URL: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 Points: 65 # Comments: 16

The Codeberg e. V. annual assembly is the meeting that puts power into the hand of our active members. Proposals are discussed live, and later voted on asynchronously. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) are an emerging but controversial technology, it is not surprising that two of the votes were concerned with Codeberg's position about this technology. The 14-day voting period ended yesterday and both proposals were accepted. The first vote was a statement about Codeberg e. V.'s stance on using your data to train LLMs. As stated in our privacy policy, "We do not want to need your data", and this also holds for the use of our user and project data for using or training generative "AI": The Codeberg forge and its associated services are not and will not use the code or data of projects and users to train "Artificial Intelligence" tools such as Large Language Models, whose purpose is to create output modelled after their training input. As an association, we believe that these technologies are incompatible with responsibly creating and maintaining free & open source software. The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members. It implies a change to our terms of use to prohibit 'vibe-coded projects'. We'll share thoughts about the practical impact at the end of the article. LLMs are a very costly technology, and those costs keep rising as the companies providing them have to start recouping their investments. They are not only costly for those who use and explicitly subscribe to these services. The costs are not only hidden in 'normal' cloud and service subscriptions that cross-finance the 'innovative new features' you never asked for. LLMs are so costly that companies externalize the costs on a massive scale - on those who don't use them and society at large. Increased hardware prices, energy use and environmental damage - we all pay for it! In past posts we have already outlined how our infrastructure at Codeberg is regularly put under heavy load from webcrawlers of those companies who plan to ingest all of the code that is hosted on Codeberg for training their LLMs. At Codeberg, we are happy to provide free and open access to code. Just run git clone and enjoy.