Gentoo moves to Codeberg from GitHub after airing Copilot concerns

Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."

The decision was made public last month, when Gentoo confirmed it intended to migrate repository mirrors and pull request contributions to the new home.

On February 16, the organization revealed it now had a presence on Codeberg, where contributions could be submitted. Gentoo posted: "Eventually also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization."

It is increasingly difficult to avoid Copilot on GitHub, and the impact of AI on open source is seen more as a negative than a positive, as repositories risk being filled with AI slop. Last week, GitHub added a setting to turn off pull requests entirely, meaning nobody can see existing pull requests or open new ones.

The new setting arrived after the Microsoft-owned biz kicked off a discussion earlier this year over "the increasing volume of low-quality contributions that is creating significant operational challenges for maintainers."

Open source fan and general tech whizz Jeff Geerling noted the problem in a recent blog post, where he wrote, "AI slop generation is getting easier, but it's not getting smarter. From what I've seen, models have hit a plateau where code generation is pretty good...

"But it's not improving like it did the past few years."

In 2024, Gentoo published a policy stating, "It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools." The ban was made on the grounds of copyright, quality, and ethical concerns.

So, no Copilot assistance or reviews, please. And then there's the whole issue of training coding assistants using the content of repositories.

The Codeberg site is based on Forgejo, is maintained by a non-profit, and is located in Berlin, Germany.

In its announcement of its intention to migrate, Gentoo wrote, "Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that," but the migration from GitHub for its mirror repositories due to those "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage" is now underway.

The Register contacted GitHub for its reaction to the move and will update if the source shack responds. ®