The seed vault just got a new neighbour - Open source is moving in and plans on staying for the long haul
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a vault for storing seeds for an extended amount of time, a sort of genebank "cold storage" (pun intended) backup for the world's agricultural history in case seeds gets lost for various reasons (accidents, conflict, equipment failures, global crises etc).
It's located on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and is funded by Norway and the Crop Trust. The Crop Trust is funded by organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other governments.
From its Wikipedia page:
At this time, the total number of samples held at the vault was 967,216,[21] representing over 13,000 years of agricultural history.[22]
An impressive feat and the deposits keep coming. Deposits are also soon coming in other forms, such as open source code...
Introducing the Artic Code Vault
On the 2nd of Febuary 2020 every public repository on GitHub will be snapshotted and stored for at least 1000 years! So if you have a few gremlins in your code, now's the time to start tidying up 😜
Stored on doomsday-surviving microfilm, the code will represent the product of decades of industry innovation and software, and it will be saved as part of our sivilization's legacy for a long, long time.
As a contributor on GitHub and industry member, it feels very exciting to be part of this snapshot and history!
Read the full article over at Bloomberg for their complete coverage and interview with GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman.