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Preserving open source software for future generations

The world is powered by open source software. It is a hidden cornerstone of modern civilization, and the shared heritage of all humanity.

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Archive Program Initiatives

Our Approach

As today’s vital code becomes yesterday’s historical curiosity, it may be abandoned, forgotten, or lost. Worse, albeit much less likely, in the case of global catastrophe, we could lose everything stored on modern media in a few generations. Archiving software across multiple organizations and forms of storage helps to ensure its long-term preservation.

The Arctic Code Vault

On 02/02/2020 GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository. Those millions of repos were then archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years, and stored in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway.

Partners and Advisors

Our partners include the Long Now Foundation, Software Heritage, the Internet Archive, Microsoft Research’s Project Silica, the Arctic World Archive, GHTorrent, and GHArchive. Our advisors include both technological visionaries and world-renowned experts in the humanities.

Latest Archive

We are collaborating with the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and Stanford Libraries in California to store copies of 17,000 of GitHub’s most popular and most-depended-upon projects—open source’s “greatest hits”—in their archives, in museum-quality cases, to preserve them for future generations.

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Our Mission

Preserve open source software for future generations.

The GitHub Archive Program is a testament to the importance of the open source community. It is our hope that it will, both now and in the future, further publicize the worldwide open source movement; contribute to greater adoption of open source and open data policies worldwide; and encourage long-term thinking.