Gentoo Linux ditches GitHub for an open-source European alternative

Gentoo has announced it now has a presence on Codeberg, a non-profit, free European alternative to GitHub. The major project with thousands of contributors will migrate all its repositories due to Microsoft’s AI push.

Gentoo is a major Linux distribution that gives users complete control – compiling all software from source code based on their specific hardware and needs.

This flexibility makes it popular among power users, researchers, and developers, with applications ranging from industrial systems and routers to embedded systems and major projects like ChromeOS, which is derived from Gentoo.

And now the massive developer community is migrating from GitHub. The Gentoo Foundation explained the reasoning behind the move on January 5th, when it announced its “Goodbye Github, welcome Codeberg” initiative.

“Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg,” the blog post reads.

Gentoo’s AI policy expressly forbids “to contribute any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools.”

However, Gentoo isn’t burning bridges overnight – it remains on GitHub and is migrating gradually.

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According to the latest announcement, the project has established a mirror of the Gentoo repository on Codeberg, allowing contributors to submit code changes. Gentoo also released documentation to help developers merge their code into the project.

“Eventually, also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization. This is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub,” the foundation said.

Gentoo explains that the mirrors are for contribution convenience – the project continues to host its own repositories and has no plans to abandon independent infrastructure.

Codeberg is a Berlin, Germany-based non-profit, community-led effort focused on privacy and supporting free and open source projects.

GitHub, owned by Microsoft, remains the center of the development ecosystem. However, many other maintainers are also complaining about the “AI slop” – involving bots submitting low-quality or worthless code contributions.

ZIG, a general-purpose programming language, announced its migration to Codeberg last year, citing GitHub’s relationship with ICE and lack of “engineering excellence.”

Cybernews also reported that developers on GitHub are now defending themselves against AI bots that are attacking their work and reputation.

Why is Gentoo anti-AI?

The project cites three main reasons why the AI-generated code is not welcome in its repositories.

First, it can increase the risk of copyright violations and also weaken Gentoo’s own copyright claims. Quality concerns are the second issue.

“Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that,” the policy reads.

“At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI.”

A third serious issue is ethical concerns, as AI projects frequently disregard others' copyright, waste enormous amounts of energy and water, harm employees, reduce service quality, and enable all kinds of spam and scams.

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