When Microsoft turned up the AI pressure on GitHub, Gentoo started packing for Codeberg, putting open source principles ahead of platform convenience.
Gentoo’s in the process of saying goodbye to GitHub. Why? In a nutshell: Microsoft and AI.
It’s ironic that GitHub, the largest platform on the planet for the version management tool Git, is owned by Microsoft. The underlying Git software was developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Lately, Microsoft has gone all in when it comes to pushing Copilot, an AI coding assistant that includes code completion, chat, and agentic workflow capabilities. Although a dumbed-down freemium version ships with Windows 11 as a built‑in, general-purpose AI assistant, what they’re pushing to developers is the much more capable paid versions, which include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Copilot+ PCs, and others.
Evidently, the company’s tactics to push Copilot onto GitHub users are a bit on the aggressive side, because they’ve driven the Linux distribution Gentoo to start a migration to GitHub competitor Codeberg.
“Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories,” the project said in its 2025 retrospective, “Gentoo currently plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg… a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that.”
Given that Gentoo is a distribution that’s unabashedly not easy to use — focused on hardcore Linux users who like to get their knuckles greasy working under the hood — its devs have probably been queasy about using GitHub since Microsoft acquired it. Copilot was just the last straw.
In any event, a couple of weeks ago the project announced that it “now has a presence on Codeberg.”
About Codeberg
Gentoo manages to have a carefully defined approach to open source — and the ideas behind it — without getting tangled up in attempting to enforce rhetoric. While its projects must use GPLv2-plus or GPL‑compatible licenses — plus CC-BY-SA for docs — and it explicitly forbids releasing Gentoo projects under non‑free licenses, it also supports user choice, and packages non‑free software in its main tree.
This pretty much aligns with the philosophy behind Codeberg. It’s a nonprofit association under German law, focused on providing open-source development services. Its mission is to provide a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code while documenting the development process. It offers standard Git forge features, including public and private repositories, pull/merge requests, wikis, and basic project management. It also offers Codeberg Pages for static website hosting using addresses such as
{username}.codeberg.pageor custom domains, driven by the git-pages software.
| Aspect | Codeberg | GitHub |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | German nonprofit (Codeberg e.V.) | For-profit corporate platform (Microsoft) |
| Software | Forgejo (open-source Gitea fork) | Largely proprietary platform |
| Focus | Privacy, free software, community governance | Scale, integrations, enterprise tooling |
| Extra services | Pages, Weblate, CI (Woodpecker, Forgejo Actions) | Pages, Actions, Copilot, extensive marketplace |
| Typical fit | Developers and projects prioritizing ethics and independence | Teams needing advanced tooling and broad ecosystem reach |
More important is how Codeberg aligns with open source and Free Software principles internally:
- It emphasizes democratic, community-driven governance in which users can participate in decisions and support the platform by way of membership or donations.
- It officially avoids dependence on large commercial or proprietary cloud providers to maintain independence, primarily by using its own hardware, most of which runs in a Berlin facility, but with a few smaller European-based providers added for redundancy and backups.
- The project prioritizes user privacy, minimal tracking, and adherence to free software principles. It positions itself as an “ethical” alternative to corporate forges.
Gentoo Going Forward
Although the Gentoo project is based in the United States, the project says it intends to lean a bit more heavily on EU-based Codeberg in the future.
“Other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization,” it said in its mid-February announcement. “This is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub.”
For developers seeking additional information, Gentoo points them to its “Project:Codeberg/Pull Requests” wiki.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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