53BloombergBusinessweek November 18, 2019
Friedman, who spent 20 years starting open source
companies and working on similar projects at large
software makers before Microsoft put him in charge of
GitHub, has the future of open source very much on his
mind a couple days before the Svalbard trip, in Oxford,
England. No true prepper is content with only one backup
plan: The Arctic cave is just the first of what GitHub plans
to be many repositories of code scattered around the
world, holding almost all the code in its data banks rather
than just the favorites. At one stop, Friedman climbs a few
flights of creaky stairs to visit the head of the Bodleian
Library, which keeps 12 million items in its glorious medi-
eval towers. Would Oxford also store some code for safe-
keeping? As it turns out, sure, they’re game. Torvalds and
Shakespeare, together forever.
In the spirit of the Svalbard cave, Friedman’s
immediate mission is to tame the existential risks fac-
ing 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 com-
panies 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. Fires
have broken out around Friedman’s family home in
Sonoma, Calif., and his wife calls to say that she and
their 3-year-old daughter are evacuating. Friedman
tells his wife to turn on their Tesla’s 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 rub-
ble—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
thanit was 20 yearsago.”<BW>Friedman, above in Svalbard, also plans to store parts of GitHub’s code library elsewhere, including Oxford University
To watch Ashlee venture into the Arctic World Archive and beyond,
check out bloomberg.com/series/hello-world