Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

This is a slightly shortened cross-post of a blog post which I co-authored with Otto Richter and William Zijl for the Codeberg blog. While some of the specifics of that post might mostly be relevant to Codeberg in particular, the ‘meat’ of the argument felt general enough to warrant being preserved and archived via this blog. This post is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). 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…