GitHub to Store Open Source Code (Like Bitcoin) for Future Generations to Find

GitHub plans to bury open source software in ice for future generations to come across, among other forms of storage.

This method of storage will be done by a Norwegian company that “specializes in very-long-term data storage.”

Partnering with the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Arctic World Archive, and others, the group is implementing what they call a LOCKSS policy, defined as Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

“A worrying amount of the world’s knowledge is currently stored on ephemeral media: hard drives, SSDs, CDs good for a few decades, backup tapes whose notional 30-year lifespans assume strictly controlled heat and humidity,” the project’s website reports.

Of course, this means they’ll also be storing the Bitcoin source code, among other open-source projects.

To do so, the group is using something called “pace layers” to archive code. These layers are hot, warm, and cold, the site notes.

Hot is updated in near real-time, warm is updated monthly to yearly, and cold is updated every five years.

Something like GitHub, for example, is updated in real-time, considering that there are hundreds if not thousands of partitions uploaded every day. The internet’s “Wayback Machine” will constantly search for information to back up as well, sitting closer to the warm section of the list.