This is pointless - a complete waste of time, effort, and energy. Isn’t there something more beneficial they could have done instead? Why pollute the Arctic with plastic and film canisters?
The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#72What I really want from github is to allow people who own open source projects who don't want to own them anymore to just hand them off for escrow so that at a later date a reputable group like apache can maintain them if needed.
If someone wants to give up their project and there isn't anyone in the community who wants to take over, the project is already dead. Open source doesn't work without people around to push it.
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#73As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…
Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephe…
Did people with repositories know this was going to happen and did you give them a choice to opt out?
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#74Where can we find the list of the 6000 repos ? On my profile it just shows 3 "and more", would like to get the full list. TYIA ;)
Same. Or how they were picked. I kept scratching my head all evening cause I haven't made any updates or contributions to mine in quite a while.
My best guess is it's some function of the popularity. The three that my profile shows are
- capnproto/capnproto
- sandstorm-io/sandstorm
- erlang/otp
(I don't remember the order).
I actively contribute heavily to sandstorm. I've sent patches here and there to capnproto, and it's vaguely a sister project to sandstorm. Those are probably some of the most popular projects I have multiple contributions to, though there are others.
otp feels a bit odd though, if there's and "and more" -- I sent them a one line patch to fix a build error when building against musl. I haven't really been involved since, nor was I before. But it's a high profile project.
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephe…
Did people with repositories know this was going to happen and did you give them a choice to opt out?
Rather more eloquently asked than by the other person I saw querying this[0]! I suspect it's covered under Github's TOS - specifically[1], only public repositories were included and these are all effectively just backups. Especially in the case of the vault in Svalbard. But you can opt out of the 'warm storage'[0].
[0] https://github.com/github/archive-program/issues/36 [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did people with repositories know this was going to happen and did you give them a choice to opt out?
Rather more eloquently asked than by the other person I saw querying this[0]! I suspect it's covered under Github's TOS - specifically[1], only public repositories were included and these are all effectively just backups. Especially in the case of the vault in Svalbard. But you can opt out of the 'warm storage'[0]. [0] https://github.com/github/archive-program/issues/36 [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-poli…
I recognize they wouldn't have done it unless they felt confident of having the legal right, but it's just bad manners not to ask first.
If that's the case, this not-a-PR stunt degraded my impression of them.
I'm quite certain this isn't what their customers contemplated when reading "backup" in their ToS.
EDIT: Interestingly it says "This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content or otherwise distribute or use it outside of our provision of the Service.
It also says "You still have control over your content".
Is a subarctic vauly really within the ordinary course of providing the service? Did content owners have an opportunity to exert any control?
Most probably think it's neat, but GitHub would be naive to imagine everyone would consent.
Also what happens if it turns out one of those repos had personal information in it and the subject makes a GDPR right-to-forget demand? Are they going to drag it out and purge that bit of tape?
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've just archived the HEAD of the 6000 most popular repos > We’ve archived 6,000 of the world’s most popular repositories as a proof of concept for future archives. > The snapshot will consist of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size.
Archive Program director here - the 6,000 repos were on the single proof-of-concept reel we archived last autumn. The full archive consists of millions of repos, including all repos with at least one star with any commits in the year leading up to 02/02/2020.
Hello Jon, the info page mentions binaries larger than 100KB are not archived. What about images of 500KB? I really am curious what these archived tar.xz files flook like. Would have been nice if the project site included an example of what retrieved data will look like. A lot of readme.md files have illustrations. Either way it's a cool project and I like what your team did.
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed? " -Thanks to flash memory cell charge leakage, I'd be surprised if the micro-SD card or USB drive kept its data for more than 3-5 years. They're designed for low cost, not longevity. -The electrolytic caps will probably have dried out and failed by 50-100 years. -The plasticizers used will have evaporated away…
Right, so it wouldn't be a 2020 computer. It would be whatever new computer they've built.
By then, why would they need code from GitHub? Given that they will won't even be able to run it in any shape or form.
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#79As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…
Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephe…
> Also worth noting we'll be storing "greatest hits" copies of the ~15,000 most-starred / most-relied-on repos, along with a sampling of several thousand repos with few/no stars
Making all of this code essentially useless. You'd need to store those repos and their entire dependency tree.
Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
#80If things come to that I doubt the practicality of it all.
But it makes easy headlines. It also makes open source an immortality project for a lot of people.