alt Hacker NewsI have no particular problem with this decision/policy on the part of Codeberg.
I do have an issue with their "tainted code" project that labels various FLOSS projects as "AI tainted".
ardour.org has the follow AI policy statement:
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Using LLMs to generate code for Ardour
A word about licensing, copyright and LLMs ("AI"). We require all code contributed to Ardour to be licensed under the GPL (you may retain copyright, but the code must use the GPL). Currently, following Thaler vs. Perlmutter in March 2025, no LLM-generated code may be copyrighted in the USA. The GPL relies on copyright, and cannot function if copyright is not held. Consequently, if you use an LLM (Claude, Codex, CoPilot etc. etc) to create code, it cannot be included in Ardour.
If you want to use LLMs to explore and understand some of Ardour's source code, feel free. But we cannot accept PRs or patches or contributions that are not licensed under the GPL, and if you choose to be honest about it, this means that no LLM-generated code can be accepted by us.
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Yet this codeberg-adjacent project considers this project to be AI-tainted. If you're going to do something, do it right or don't do it at all.
They didn't consult a lawyer when they wrote that. The idea that public domain code that is not copyrightable is incompatible with the GPL is simply not true. sqlite is in the public domain and not copyrightable, for example.
Their decision leans too heavily on what that court decision said. It was actually fairly nuanced.
The court explicitly declined to address whether Thaler could be considered the author because he created the AI, because Thaler originally listed the machine as the sole author in his registration application.
It is clear that works generated entirely by AI without meaningful human contribution are not eligible for copyright protection, though it does not resolve questions regarding AI-assisted works where human input is significant, which is a predominant use case with AI-assisted coding.
Finally, it appears they're unfamiliar with copyright rules around non-copyrightable works that are combined with other creative copyrightable works. The result is almost universally copyrightable. I'm hedging because I haven't thought through the cases exhaustively, but I can't think of a single case where the resulting work would not be copyrightable.