GitSCMFile::content() creates a ByteArrayInputStream with the content of the file requested instead of returning the stream provided by jgit.

Basically base class SCMFile already has a method contentAsBytes() which would convert the stream into a byte[] if really required.

So in this case jgit itself might hold the files content already as byte[], GitSCMFile::content creates a new copy and SCMFile::contentAsBytes creates the next instance.