Norway has an island called Svalbard which is full of polar bears. It’s actually an archipelago or a group of islands if you will and also home to the Northern most town in the world.

In the last decades Svalbard has been a host to numerous Hollywood movies due to the arctic feeling and polar bears. Orion’s Belt, Die Another Day, The Golden Compass, Eight Below, Frozen Planet just to name a few.

In year 2008, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, has been launched to create a space for preserving seed samples from all around the world, just in case.

Global Seed Vault

Now, GitHub is doing a similar project, this time with the open-source codes of millions of developers on Github.

Github announced that they have partnered with Arctic World Archive which partnered with an old decommissioned mine in Svalbard which goes 250 meter deep to preserve the codes with the use of films.

AWA states it mission as "to help preserve the world's digital memory and ensure that the world's most irreplaceable digital memories of art, culture and literature are secured and made available to future generations" on their cool website.

It makes sense to preserve all the public repositories we all depend on in case of a Force Majeure that’s big enough to wipe out majority of our civilization on planet Earth.

Piql AS is the company behind the durable film technology that will be used for storing the codes for the next 1000 years.

GitHub has already deposited 6,000 of its most significant repositories in AWA, capturing the evolution of technology and software. This collection includes source codes for some of the most significant repositories such as: Linux and Android operating systems; Python, Ruby, Rust programming languages; Node, V8, React, and Angular; Bitcoin and Ethereum; TensorFlow and FastAI; and many more. With Arctic Code Vault project, GitHub will now store all active public repositories.

Arctic Code Vault project will take place on February 2, 2020 so if your public repositories have bugs in them you might want to clean up before your program freezes for the next 1000 years, literally.

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