One day in April, many of you woke up and opened GitHub to find a Mars 2020 Helicopter Contributor badge in your achievements column

What happened?

On April 19, NASA and JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of which Qian co-founded) carried out the first-ever test flight of Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter.

In the software field behind this achievement, there are open source authors from all over the world.

For example, the achievement of this particularly large badge can be inferred:

The front-end interface of the world’s first Mars helicopter was developed with Vue

You can view the full list here

The point of GitHub’s move is to give people a more concrete understanding of the intangible artifacts of open source software. In a nutshell:

Open source can really change the world

Frozen code

This isn’t the first time GitHub has experimented with gamified achievements.

On February 2 of last year, GitHub saved some of its open source code in AWA.

AWA (Arctic Code Vault/ Arctic World Archive) is a project between Norwegian mining company SNSK and ULTRA-long term data storage service provider Piql AS.

The project stores data on silver halide film

The data in the film is stored in the form of qr codes, each frame containing 8.8 million pixels.

The films are stored in special containers in an abandoned coal mine in the Arctic Circle.

As a mine 250 metres underground in the permafrost, the data are expected to be preserved for 1,000 years.

So what kind of open source projects can participate in this initiative? One of the following conditions must be met:

  • Have at least 1 star or commit repository in the year before snapshot creation

  • Have at least 250star of all warehouses

The default branch of a repository that meets the criteria removes all binaries greater than 100KB (not if the repository’s STAR is greater than 250) and packages them as TAR.

All the selected open source projects have a total volume of 21TB and are stored in 186 rolls of film.

These numbers probably represent what the open source world looks like on February 2, 2020.

Where is digital property going

While we are still wondering what will happen to my QQ and wechat accounts after I die,

In the open source world, developers’ fingerprints have been safeguarded in the remote arctic permafrost.

A thousand years later, the bodies of the original developers are long gone.

But when later generations opened the sealed doors of the mine, they unrolled rolls of film and deciphered lines of code from thousands of years ago.

What they see is not Redis, Vue, clumsily written demos, or painstakingly collected interview questions.

But line by line proof that we have come to……