Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

In Brief:

• Two motions regarding "artificial intelligence" and Large Language Models (LLMs) were voted on among Codeberg e. V. members and passed.
• We are promising to not use any of your data to train LLM and explain what the planned Terms of Use change mean for 'vibe-coded' projects.
• We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

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.

We all pay for hungry LLMs

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!

Strained servers due to nonsensical crawling

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.

Unfortunately, these crawlers instead try to read every single page from Codeberg, no matter if it makes sense. This includes all the different issue filter variants, Git history, as well as the actual files at any point in Git history - even if they are still equal.

These needless accesses create expensive database queries that diminish the service quality for all of us, requires substantial amounts of work from our system administrators, and force us to spend time building defensive mechanisms instead of cool new stuff.

The development team of none

Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

It seems like many 'vibe coders' don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

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. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

Hardware sourcing is becoming an headache

The training and deployment of LLMs has drastically raised the cost of buying hardware, in particular for SSDs and memory. To give you an example: The type of drive we sourced for €700 only some years ago has risen to €3,700 now - and is often out of stock. As a consequence, hosting code on Codeberg is becoming more expensive.

A growing digital divide

These price hikes also lead to a growing digital divide: Small and even large operators are endangered by rising costs, while only the largest cloud companies have reliable agreements for hardware. Increasing costs for services like website hosting, storage or compute can be challenging to a lot of small NGOs, local coops, research projects and other usage of digital tools that we considered for granted until recently.

Civic infrastructure, its users, and the environment suffer

The negative impacts on infrastructures concern more basic civic infrastructure: Due to the energy and water demands that are inherent to the data centers built specifically for training LLMs, many communities already today experience rising consumer costs for both electricity and drinking water. In Frankfurt, data centers already now consume 40% of the local electricity, and demand is rising.

Collaboration at danger

It is not purely the digital and civic infrastructures that are impacted by the use of LLMs. The free/libre software ecosystem is a social phenomenon centered on collaboration. 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, eroding trust within the community.