I created a new Git project on my GitHub profile today as I began some work on a possible conference presentation. I was surprised to see a message that said I’d received an achievement badge because I’d “contributed code to the 2020 GitHub Archive Program and now have a badge for it. Thank you for being part of the program!”

Clicking through the Archive program link to find out more, I saw that “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.”

Which sounds kind of cool, in more ways than one. However, I’m not excited about not really getting a way to opt out of that archive. Although the message on the achievement badge notification says something about being able to opt out in settings, clicking through to settings doesn’t take me anywhere that makes it clear what setting I’d need to adjust. Further, if they’ve already “archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years”, thinking any setting I list now is sort of moot anyway.

This isn’t the only usage of code item GitHub’s made public lately: their new CoPilot program uses the source of public code repositories, apparently regardless of the license used by the repository owner. Starting to wonder if I need to check more seriously into Gitlab’s offerings….