Help the community

• About the impact of AI crawlers

  Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face - Drew DeVault
  https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me/

• About Copyright
  • The Asahi Linux project has made a complete ban of AI for any contributions.

    Generative AI Policy
    It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.
    https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/

  • NLNet has also a policy to avoid giving grants and having people externalizing the work to a LLM

    Policy on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for NLnet-funded project
    https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/

• About Trust
  • The issue of AI regarding Trust insides software teams and opensource maintenance.

    Yes, I will judge you for using AI... https://jaysthoughts.com/aithoughts1

• About maintainer burden, correctness, security, ...
  • Servo

    AI contributions - Servo Documentation
    https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started.html#ai-contributions

  • Ziglings

    What we don't accept is AI-generated exercises, AI-generated comments, or pull requests produced by coding agents. Ziglings exercises require understanding the Zig build system, the didactic progression, and the specific conventions of this project. That understanding doesn't come from a prompt.
    https://codeberg.org/ziglings/exercises/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

Other policies used during this research to explore what others are doing

• Forgejo
  • Big discussion in the Forgejo project: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/366
  • Current policy: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/src/branch/main/AIAgreement.md
• Responsible usage imposed by the Podman project:

  The Golden Rule
  Do not prompt an LLM vaguely. Do not commit the LLM results unchanged. And do not submit them as-is.
  Using LLMs as a tool is completely fine. Using them as a replacement for understanding, responsibility, and craftsmanship is not.
  https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/blob/main/LLM_POLICY.md

• Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy
  https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/contributing/llm-policies/

• Fedora policy

  AI-Assisted Contributions Policy
  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/policy/ai-contribution-policy/

• LLVM policy

  LLVM’s policy is that contributors can use whatever tools they would like to craft their contributions, but there must be a human in the loop. Contributors must read and review all LLM-generated code or text before they ask other project members to review it.
  https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html

• Gentoo policy

  It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

• Idea of Assisted-By Git commit footer: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/assisted-by-footer/
• Blender discussions and final policy
  • https://devtalk.blender.org/t/ai-contributions-policy-proposal/44202/104
  • https://developer.blender.org/docs/handbook/contributing/ai_contributions/
• NixOS
  • https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-core-team-update-2026-05-11-automation-ai-policy-feedback-and-new-members-wanted/77567
  • https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/15340
  • https://discourse.nixos.org/t/proposal-to-have-an-ai-usage-policy/75650
• KeePassXC: https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-09-about-keepassxcs-code-quality-control/
• Wikipedia LLM policy

  Text generated by large language models (LLMs)[a] often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies. For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited,[b] except for the uses as outlined below
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models

  • See RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

The presentation article from The Linux Foundation. The DCO was introduced in the Linux kernel mailing list in May 2004.

Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) - The Linux Foundation
https://bestpractices.linuxfoundation.org/ip/contribution-mechanisms-dco.html

To understand why this is necessary, please read this article

The most powerful contributor agreement - By Jonathan Corbet, April 2, 2014
https://lwn.net/Articles/592503/

genimage's integration of DCO with explanations and signoff requirements https://github.com/pengutronix/genimage?tab=readme-ov-file#license-and-developing

Why don't we use the Signed-off-by system ?

• It is not easy to review for maintainers (checking every commit metadata online)
• Or it would require a CI/CD system to continously check it at each commits. There is bot on GitHub but not Codeberg. We don't have time to develop our own bot just for this.
• This system requires to rewrite history when someone forgot it. This is probably harder and more confusing for new contributors. This adds more steps for new contributors.
• In our viewpoint, there is no clear link between this Git comment Signed-off-by and the DCO (if we don't read the policy o), so the argument of "this will keep what happens in your source repository" seems not very strong. If you don't know this system and you check "git log", you have no idea there is the DCO behind it... The man git commit confirms that -s, --signoff, --no-signoff, Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project to which you’re committing.

As we also need people to approve our policy, we prefer to do everything at once via a statement in the PR.

Dart on the bottom of https://dart.dev/

Except as otherwise noted, this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and code samples are licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License.

The situation of Stackoverflow

Stackoverflow User content license
What is the license for the content I post?
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

The Rust forum TOS, with the needs to reuse content into RFCs.

User contributions made on or after 2020-07-17 are dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses unless otherwise stated. The licenses were explicitly chosen to ensure that text from comments on this forum may be included in RFCs, which are also licensed in the same fashion, per RFC 2044. This license also implies that content from the comments on this forum (including code snippets) can be incorporated into the rust-lang/rust repository (or other repositories using a similar license). https://users.rust-lang.org/tos#3

Typst forum licensing at the start of the forum. 15 people had to accept the relicense their previous contributions. There is also a nice History feature in the Forum About page.

Licence for posts and comments on the forums
A comment by @afiaith
Stack Exchange questions, answers and comments are released under CC BY-SA. IMHO this is a wonderful decision, because it is a safeguard in case something happens (see what happened to Xitter for an… extreme scenario): people are able to archive the content and make it available for posterity. [...]
https://forum.typst.app/t/licence-for-posts-and-comments-on-the-forums/137

Typst forum FAQ

This Forum derives its value from the activity of its users. By posting threads and questions, replying, bookmarking, and more, you can help yourself and other users achieve their goals with Typst more effectively. Use the Forum to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.
All posts on this Forum are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, meaning that you are free to copy posts and the snippets within as long as you give attribution to the author of them.
https://forum.typst.app/faq#participate

On the Discourse meta forum

Who owns the content you post on a forum? aka, User Content Licensing
https://meta.discourse.org/t/who-owns-the-content-you-post-on-a-forum-aka-user-content-licensing/4261/22

Discourse TOS examples (this is part of the setup process, so most Discourse forums have this style of TOS)

https://try.discourse.org/tos

StackExchange network under CC-BY-SA-4.0

6. Content Permissions, Restrictions, and Creative Commons Licensing
   https://engineering.stackexchange.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing

AGPLv3 and CC-BY-SA strategy on snowdrift.coop

3. Ownership of Content, Right to Post, and License Grants https://snowdrift.coop/terms

Maker Forums switching from CC-BY-SA-NC-3.0 to CC-BY-SA-4.0

https://forum.makerforums.info/t/important-announcement-upgrading-the-user-contribution-license-in-the-maker-forums-terms-of-service/82643

Can I legally use code I found on a forum?
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/can-i-legally-use-code-i-found-on-a-forum

Zulip note for non-code contributions As noted above, Zulip’s policy is to express appreciation for non-code contributions to the project whenever we discuss code contribution statistics.
...
So, while we cannot thank everyone by name, please know that your contributions are deeply appreciated!
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/counting-contributions.html#attribution-for-non-code-contributions

For now, we don't want to write a Trademark policy like Wikimedia https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_Trademark_Policy And I need more time to think about this. For now, I keep the logo All rights reserved to Samuel Roland.

Here is a few links found during our research on what people are doing out there.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons does not recommend using a CC license on a logo or trademark. While a logo or trademark can be covered by copyright laws in addition to trademark laws, the special purposes of trademarks make CC licenses an unsuitable mechanism for sharing them in most cases.
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#could-i-use-a-cc-license-to-share-my-logo-or-trademark

How should I license my project's logo?
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2224/how-should-i-license-my-projects-logo

GNU Head logo

This image is available under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3, or the Free Art License, or the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.
The GNU head is, however, also a trademark for the GNU Project. If you want to use the GNU head to link to a website run by the Free Software Foundation or the GNU project, feel free, or if you're using it in contexts talking about GNU in a supportive and accurate way, you can also do this without permission. For any other requests, please ask licensing@fsf.org for permission first.
https://www.gnu.org.cach3.com/graphics/heckert_gnu.html

The Forgejo logo is CC-BY-SA-4.0

https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/src/branch/main/branding

VueJS under CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 with extra conditions

https://github.com/vuejs/art