With the motive of preserving the code for future generations, GitHub, along with other known foundations, has initiated the ‘Arctic Code Vault’ GitHub Archive Program
Why the Arctic?
There is similar storage for all the seeds stored in the world known as the ‘Svalbard Seed Vault or Global Seed Vault’ Svalbard Global Seed Vault — Crop Trust .
This is the objective of the Seed Vault:
It is a long-term seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time — and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters. The Seed Vault represents the world’s largest collection of crop diversity.
Why is the preservation of code necessary?
All the current storage options available ranging from hard drives, SSDs, CDs are only robust enough to last for a few decades. So to extend this preservation beyond this limitation to a lifespan of over 1000 years the data will instead be stored on 3,500-foot silver halide film reels.
When was the first storage done?
On 02/02/2020, which included all the active public and dormant GitHub repositories.
What were the criteria considered for a repository to be archived?
- Every repository with any commits between 13/11/2019–02/02/2020 (previous 80 days)
- Every repository with at least 1 star and any commits between 02/03/2019–02/02/2020 (previous 365 days)
- Every repository with at least 250 stars.
What did it include from each repository?
- HEAD of the default branch of each repository
- Excluding any binaries larger than 100KB.
- Each Repository is compressed as single TAR file.
How do you know if you have contributed to the Arctic Code Vault?
On The desktop GitHub website, the ‘Arctic Code Vault Contributor’ badge will be included under the Highlights section:
The video propagates a nostalgic feeling:
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