I had heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but I hadn’t heard of the nearby Arctic World Archive until today. The latter contains source code preserved on film, a format that should last at least 500 years.
One thought on “Seed vault, but for code”
Comments are closed.
I first heard about this when I saw that my GitHub profile got a random badge (side note: why does everything have to have “badges” now?) indicating that I “participated” in the GitHub archive program. After looking into it, I realized that what “participated” actually means is that I contributed code to an open-source project hosted on GitHub, and they backed it up to the Arctic World Archive (https://archiveprogram.github.com/).
At first I was skeptical (are future humans really going to value having a point-in-time snapshot of a random assortment of free software?), but then I realized that there’s one particular case where this project could prove not just helpful but invaluable: they are archiving software to decode various file formats. My small bugfix to libtiff might matter to a future historian / anthropologist / archaeologist (although I was fixing a security bug, so maybe it will only matter in that it keeps their future-computer from getting pwned by the Ghost of Malware Past).