news
Proprietary Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub) Versus FreeBSD
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FreeBSD ☛ Action Required: Recent ports history has been rewritten
On 2026-07-20, a 150MB binary file was committed to the ports tree, causing mirroring to GitHub and possibly other Git forges to fail due to a hard file size limit of 100MB. Additionally, it is unclear if the licensing of the binary permits redistribution in this fashion.
On 2026-07-21, core@ became aware that mirroring was broken and requested the suspension of pushes to the ports repository while we assessed the situation. Discussions over the following hours among members of gitadm@, clusteradm@, portmgr@, and core@ resulted in a tentative plan to rewrite the repository history to remove the offending file, with the agreed constraint that the resulting state must be reproducible by third parties and must not impose an unreasonable burden on downstream consumers of the ports tree.
The decision that the resulting state be reproducible by third parties arose from our shared view that we should not demand implicit trust, and that we should make it easy for our users and downstreams to reflect the same values. While `git rebase` can easily remove the offending commits, it imposes a greater audit burden on our community because it rewrites committer names and timestamps. It also affects the downstream communities which have forks of the ports tree. Providing a mechanism to repeat this operation has potential impact that extends far beyond our own community, and we appreciate your understanding and patience as we worked to get this right.
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OS News ☛ FreeBSD ports frozen after someone commits the entire 150MB Linux Copilot binary
While FreeBSD’s ports tree is not hosted by GitHub – it’s merely mirrored there – the FreeBSD team believes the community values the GitHub mirror too much, and as such, steps had to be taken to fix this. Ports has not been compromised and users’ systems do not appear to be at risk in any way due to this occurrence, which is good news.
Curiously, the official announcement makes no mention of which 150MB file, exactly, was committed to ports, but it didn’t take for people long to pinpoint the offending commit (screenshot). It turns out someone committed the entire github-copilot-cli Linux binary to ports, as part of the github-copilot-cli port. This FreeBSD port is effectively a way to easily install and run this tool on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD.