Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave

GitHub is preparing for a different kind of the end of the world.

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Ashlee Vance

@valleyhack More stories by Ashlee Vance

November 13, 2019, 5:00 AM EST

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The last stop for civilization before the North Pole is Svalbard, an archipelago north of mainland Norway along the 80th parallel. Most of Svalbard’s old Norwegian and Russian coal mines have shut down, so locals have rebranded their vast acres of permafrost as an attraction to scientists, doomsday preppers, and scientist doomsday preppers. Around Svalbard, things can be hidden from the stresses of the outside world. There’s a treaty in place to keep it neutral in times of war. In other words, it’s an ideal spot for a big global reset button or two.

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Photographer: Guy Martin for Bloomberg Businessweek

Arctic World Archive, the seed vault’s much less sexy cousin. Friedman unlocks the container door with a simple door key and, inside, deposits much of the world’s open source software code. Servers and flash drives aren’t durable enough for this purpose, so the data is encoded on what look like old-school movie reels, each weighing a few pounds and stored in a white plastic container about the size of a pizza box. It’s basically microfilm. With the help of a magnifying glass, you—or, say, a band of End Times survivors—can see the data, be it pictures, text, or lines of code. A Norwegian company called Piql AS makes the specialized rolls of super-durable film, coated with iron oxide powder for added Armageddon-resistance. Piql says the material should hold up for 750 years in normal conditions, and perhaps 2,000 years in a cold, dry, low-oxygen cave.

Friedman places his reel on one of the archive’s shelves, alongside a couple dozen that include Vatican archives, Brazilian land registry records, loads of Italian movies, and the recipe for a certain burger chain’s special sauce. GitHub, which Microsoft bought last year for $7.5 billion, plans to become by far the biggest tenant. Eventually, Friedman says, GitHub will leave 200 platters, each carrying 120 gigabytes of open source software code, in the vault. The first reel included the Linux and Android operating systems, plus 6,000 other important open source applications.

Yes, this may seem like a stunt, headlamps and all. If the world is ravaged to the point where Svalbard is the last repository of usable wheat and corn seeds, the source code for YouTube will probably rank pretty low on humankind’s hierarchy of needs. Yet to Friedman, it’s a natural next step. Open source software, in his view, is one of the great achievements of our species, up there with the masterpieces of literature and fine art. It has become the Bill Gates’s subordinates described the code-sharing model as “a cancer,” a threat to everything that patent-loving capitalists should hold dear. “If you told someone 20 years ago that in 2020, all of human civilization will depend on and run on open source code written for free by volunteers in countries all around the world who don’t know each other, and it’ll just be downloaded and put into almost every product, I think people would say, ‘That’s crazy, that’s never going to happen. Software is written by big, professional companies,’ ” Friedman says in the vault, which he describes more as a time capsule than a critical insurance policy. “It’s sort of a magical moment. Having a historical record of this will, I think, be valuable to future generations.”

To many in the software trade, the craziest and most magical thing here is a Microsoft executive

Programmers freely swapped code long before Linus Torvalds wrote the core of the Linux OS at the University of Helsinki in the early 1990s, but his creation was a standard-bearer for what became known as “the free and open source software movement.” Microsoft was making obscene amounts of money through Windows and Office, and closely guarded the source code of these products. As the U.S. Department of Justice began trying to reckon with Microsoft’s influence over innovation and competition, DIY hacker types such as Torvalds argued that the very idea of patented proprietary software stood in opposition to free speech, free access to public goods and knowledge, and progress itself. (This was less radical than it might sound; U.S. law didn’t recognize software as intellectual property until the late ’70s.)

These idealists injected a dose of counterculture spirit into the debate over how much control a few large companies ought to have around technological advances. Linux became the most prominent alternative to Windows, and other coders created a free package of open source Office alternatives called, of course, biggest-ever software deal. GitHub users can also opt to sponsor coders or projects that interest them, à la Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites. Often, though, open source coders don’t get paid what they’re worth, and their status as hobbyists complicates the corporate world’s reliance on their work.

About this time last year a 48-year-old software developer in Sweden named Daniel Stenberg received a panicked call one evening from a large German automaker. The car company, which Stenberg declines to name, asked that he fly to Germany immediately because an application Stenberg had written was causing the entertainment system software in 7 million cars to crash. “I had to inform them that, you know, this is a spare-time project for me and that I have a full-time job and can’t just go to Germany for them,” Stenberg says. “They started out pretty demanding, but then switched when they realized the situation they were in.”

This is fairly typical for Stenberg, who since 1998 has been refining a widely used open source tool known as curl. Over the years, curl has found its way into the electronics of almost every new car, as well as software written by the likes of Apple, Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify Technology. On any given day, more than 1 billion people will unknowingly use curl, which helps transfer data between internet-based services. Developers from major companies and startups alike have grabbed curl off GitHub and elsewhere and inserted it into their products in ways that Stenberg could never have field-tested himself, and they’re not shy to send him messages at all hours demanding that he fix bugs promptly.

“Most of the days … I tear my hair when fixing bugs, or I try to rephrase my emails to [not] sound old and bitter (even though I can very well be that) when I once again try to explain things to users who can be extremely unfriendly and whining,” Stenberg writes on his big tech companies’ privacy grabs. He’s pitching a hardware-software package called the

In the spirit of the Svalbard cave, Friedman’s immediate mission is to tame the existential risks facing open source software. During our time together, he recounts story after story of large companies that have no idea how much open source software they depend on, who wrote it, how old it is, or what security holes might exist in it. He’s hoping that Semmle Ltd., a security research company GitHub recently acquired, can help close those gaps. GitHub is also refining the parts of its user interface that show a business what code it’s using, where that code is from, and when it needs updating. Yet another important step will be the creation of a more formal system for uniting big companies to subsidize volunteer efforts like curl, he says. There should be an easy way that Apple, Spotify, and the unnamed large German automaker can split the cost of a meaningful full-time wage for Stenberg with a few clicks.

“We would be successful if we could create a new middle class of open source developers,” Friedman says. “If you do this right, you create more innovation.”

GitHub’s most existential mission feels more urgent a few hours after we leave the Svalbard code cave. Bioweapon Defense Mode, which filters the outside air in extreme fashion. By the time dinner rolls around, he knows his house has been reduced to mostly ash. A photo of his front door archway—all that’s left standing amid the smoking rubble—soon becomes the image most media outlets choose for their coverage. With much of California burning or blacked out, an Arctic reset button starts to make a lot more sense. As Friedman has said several times by now on our trip, “I think the world is fundamentally weirder than it was 20 years ago.”