The topic This Linux distro wants to keep running software 1,000 years from now is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Saving things for a civilization living in the year 3,000 is pretty tricky. Ensuring that whatever you’re preserving manages to survive for a millennium is hard enough, but then you have the issue of telling the people of the future what exactly they’re looking at. Ideally, you need to set up a Rosetta Stone situation, where people can reverse-engineer what you want to tell them.
But how do we give the people generations ahead of us the ability to run the software we use today with minimal effort? Well, one Linux distro aims to make the process much easier for people in the third millennium by giving them a single instruction.
As spotted by Linuxiac, the Eternal Software Initiative has announced its new Linux distro, Subleq+. It’s not meant to be something you run on a daily driver; instead, it acts as a digital time capsule to keep software running 1,000 years from now.
As the Eternal Software Initiative explains, we can’t rely on emulation, as getting an emulator up and running will be pretty complex for a future civilization to replicate. Instead, the goal is to make an operating system that accepts a very simple command and runs software designed for it, also known as ‘capsules’:
Software, OS, and all dependencies get packaged into a single self-contained ‘capsule’ – a sequence of numbers that encodes an entire software stack. We provide example capsules; with our open-source toolchain (available now on GitHub), anyone can build capsules from their own software.
A reference virtual machine to run capsules is written in C and is less than a page of code. The complete specification is short enough to fit on a napkin, so that someone in future can build a working VM from scratch in under an hour and revive the software inside a capsule.
To achieve an easy-to-use OS, the designers opted for a simple instruction to use it: SUbtract and Branch if Less than or EQual to zero. That’s why it’s called Subleq+, the instructions are basically the name. You can check out the project on its GitHub page.
Linux is a completely different beast than it was a decade ago.