Next to the famous Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, is an abandoned coal mine protecting a different kind of resource against the end of the world: all of GitHub’s open source code.
Now, if the world ends, whatever survivors crawl out of the ashes will be able to access and use the software behind modern-day tech, perhaps on that weird post-apocalyptic operating system that some coders unveiled last month.
Since 2017, the Arctic World Archive, as it’s known, has stored other virtual documents, adding Vatican archives, movies and anything else worth backing up, according to a new feature from Bloomberg.
And now, thanks to input from Microsoft-owned GitHub, it also includes a hard copy of nearly every single open-source program in the world, which can be read without the need for a magnifying glass.
The open source community is often dismissed as a fringe group of tech idealists, but much of the digital architecture with which we interact every day technically falls under the broad umbrella of publicly available open source code, Bloomberg reports. Think Facebook, Google, and Amazon — all of them rely on it.
So while selling GitHub knowledge seems (and partly is) like a little gimmick, it may one day prove convenient if a crisis wipes out the world’s hard drives.
READ MORE: Open source code will survive the Arctic cave apocalypse [Bloomberg]
More on the end of days: To Prevent the Apocalypse, MIT Says to Study “Machine Behavior”
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