Great to see an organization swoop in, so to speak, to preserve a defunct application, then go a step further and open the source code to developers. Hope to see this happen more often.

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt design museum in New York just acquired the source code to an iPad app called Planetary from its now-defunct developer. Code is officially art now.

Planetary, as you can see in the video above, is basically a fancy music visualizer. The app’s source code was donated to the Cooper-Hewitt, which promptly open-sourced the code in hopes that people will use its visualization methods for other applications. Beyond the original lines of code, the museum has made a commitment to preserving the offshoots of the open-source project, and to nurturing their development. Planetary’s source has also been printed out in machine-readable OCR-A font on archival stock. Apparently, posterity demands a physical paper record that’s a little less fleeting than a digital archive.

See the full story: The Smithsonian Just Added a Chunk of Code to Its Permanent Collection | Gizmodo.