After Microsoft couldn't keep its AI hands to itself, a notoriously complex Linux distro has started its long march away from GitHub

A view of a gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguin at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. Scientists and researchers from various countries are collaborating on projects during the X Antarctic Expedition aboard the Colombian research vessel 'ARC Simon Bolivar,' designed exclusively to develop scientific projects. These initiatives involve analyzing the current condition of the Antarctic sea, studying atmospheric pressure, and monitoring the species inhabiting this region of the planet. .

Gentoo Linux has kicked off its long transition away from Microsoft's GitHub to Codeberg, an open-source git-hosting service run by the Berlin-based non-profit Codeberg e.V (via Phoronix).

Which is quite an intimidating series of nouns, but here's why the average Joe/Jane might find it interesting: Gentoo is specifically migrating away from GitHub because Microsoft just can't keep its AI hands to itself. In its 2025 retrospective, published last month, Gentoo announced an initiative to migrate its mirrors from GitHub to Codeberg, "mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."

Like any other AI company, Microsoft is ravenous for training data, and has leveraged its ownership of GitHub (which it acquired in 2018, not without controversy) to feed that hunger, training its LLMs on public repos hosted on the site and nagging users to make use of its GitHub Copilot assistant.

Well, Gentoo's had enough. In a post on the project's site yesterday, it announced that "Gentoo now has a presence on Codeberg, and contributions can be submitted for the Gentoo repository mirror at https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo as an alternative to GitHub." It's not a full leap—you don't move a project as large and complex as Gentoo in one fell swoop—but it's the beginning of a long process.

"Eventually also other git repositories will become available under the Codeberg Gentoo organization," wrote Gentoo's maintainers, assuring users that "These mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of contribution too."

I'm pretty sure Tux is not a Gentoo penguin, but I'm no penguinologist. (Image credit: Future)

Gentoo is a venerable and well-respected Linux distro, albeit one with a reputation for complexity. That reputation mostly stems from the way it handles packages; users traditionally compile their own software from source rather than making use of precompiled binaries (which is what those of us on simpler OSes are generally used to, as compiling software from source can be, delicately, a complete ballache).

Nevertheless, it has a fairly sizeable—and often quite welcoming—community, and was the basis for the ChromiumOS operating system from which Google's own ChromeOS was derived. If it's sick enough of Copilot to start a major shift like this, it's certainly not alone.