Mastodon Feed
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
We love you @Codeberg
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html
As an association, we believe that these technologies are incompatible with responsibly creating and maintaining free & open source software. [...]
The development team of none: [...] To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects. [...]
The free/libre software ecosystem, of which we consider Codeberg an important part of, is a social phenomenon centered on collaboration. Working in this way is only possible thanks to free sharing and mutual learning. [...] by adopting LLMs people tend to code single-use software from scratch. While this leads to an increase in 'shared' code, it is mostly code that not only has not been 'written' by anyone but is also not maintained by anyone. [...]The widespread use of LLMs in FLOSS is instead becoming a multidimensional attack on the trust between contributors and the very idea of convivial collaboration itself. [...]
Together, these forces make collaboration not only harder but also less rewarding: With the transaction cost of collaboration increasing, people are becoming less likely to contribute to creating high-quality software projects and more likely to 'vibecode' a one-off software that is specific to your need, and won't evolve beyond. We get a vicious cycle where collaboration is becoming less and less rewarding, while the amount of single-use software that's unmaintained and never sees any improvements is going up.Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. We are a place for people to collaborate and improve software together
