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The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

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Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#11

Post by cmrx64 »

dakiol wrote: post #9
gdsdfe wrote: post #8

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

I agree. I can't believe they are spending so much money and effort to preserve code I don't give a damn now and once I pushed to GitHub. And like me, 99% of the devs I know personally.

it's probably less effort to just archive the whole damn thing and let the future figure it out than to decide important things to archive and leaving everything else to disappear someday

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#13

Post by price »

gdsdfe wrote: post #8

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

Take a look at the partners named at the bottom. From GitHub's perspective, this is in part a PR stunt. But the Internet Archive, and Software Heritage, are quite serious. The people in those organizations are there for the mission, and if they're in on this project it's because someone there believes it matters to their mission.

You're free not to care about what situation humans might be in in a thousand years or what they might need then. I can't say I spend any effort day to day working with that distant future in mind myself. But I'm glad there are people in our civilization who do.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#14

Post by therealmarv »

Only disappointed that the new badge does not show the 2 open source projects I contributed to in the last 10 years of my work for open source :( They are not super big, but also not super small.

Seems organisation work is ignored and only individual username fork/PRs respected (is this a bug?). Software is teamwork ;)

I mean awesome-react, tldr-pages or homebrew-cask are probably not unimportant but that's not where I contributed most to.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#17

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Gollapalli wrote: post #6

Beautiful. Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we've developed in the past 70 or so years. There's been so much advancement, but it's also transferred in such a way (institutional knowledge, propietary software, proprietary hardware, etc.) that it's super easy to lose. If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline an…

> If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss

...can we?

I'm sometimes a little concerned about how complicated chip fabs are. They feel like something that could take generations to rebuild, even if we had all the knowledge on what to do.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#18

Post by tw4l »

As 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 quite useful. From the same post: "They are using a range of technologies, making feeds available over the Internet, and partnering with the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation and the Bodleian Library. These are mostly things which will get used in the foreseeable future, and should be applauded for that reason."

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#19

Post by price »

erikbye wrote: post #3
makerofspoons wrote: post #2

I was hoping for more of a description on how they plan to keep this vault safer than the Global Seed Vault, which was once flooded due to soaring arctic temperatures: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...

That was sensationalism, per usual. Bit of water in the access tunnel, no seed damage.

The story says right up front in the subhed that the flooding didn't reach the seeds. But the quotes make it pretty clear that what did happen was out of spec.

For something that's meant to survive any catastrophe that might happen over centuries to come, it's not a good sign to see that happen so early. It's extra bad to see it driven by a trend, namely global warming, that we're continuing to push farther and farther and have shown few signs of stopping.

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