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Software Heritage

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Software Heritage
FormationJune 30, 2016; 8 years ago (2016-06-30)
FounderRoberto Di Cosmo
Stefano Zacchiroli
HeadquartersInria
Location
Scientific Advisors
Gérard Berry
Jean-François Abramatic
Serge Abiteboul
AffiliationsInria
Staff
13
Websitesoftwareheritage.org

Software Heritage is a non-profit multi-stakeholder initiative unveiled in 2016 by Inria,[1] and supported by UNESCO.[2][3][4]

Overview

The stated mission of Software Heritage is to collect, preserve and share all software that is publicly available in source code form, with the goal of building a common, shared infrastructure at the service of industry, research, culture and society as a whole.[5]

Software source code is collected by crawling code hosting platforms, like GitHub, GitLab.com or Bitbucket, and package archives, like Npm or Pypi, and ingested into a special data structure, a Merkle DAG, that is the core of the Software Heritage archive.[6] Each artifact in the archive is associated with an identifier, called SWHID.[7]

In order to increase the chances of preserving the Software Heritage archive over the long term, a mirror program has been put in place in 2018, joined by ENEA [8] and FossID [9] as of October 2020.

History

Software Heritage was developed at Inria since early 2015, under the direction of computer scientists Roberto Di Cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli,[10] and announced officially to the public on June 30, 2016.[1][11]

In 2017 Inria signed an agreement with UNESCO for the long term preservation of software source code and for making it widely available, in particular through the Software Heritage initiative .[12]

In June 2018, at UNESCO Headquarters, the Software Heritage Archive [6] was opened.[2]

On July 4, 2018, Software Heritage was included in the French National Plan for Open Science [13]

In October 2018 the strategy and vision underlying the mission of Software Heritage was published in Communication of the ACM.[5]

In November 2018, Inria and UNESCO convened a group of 40 international experts to meet in November 2018 on invitation from Inria and UNESCO [14] leading to the publication on February 2019 of the Paris Call on Software Source Code.[15]

In November 2019, GitHub signed an agreement with Inria to improve the archival process of GitHub hosted projects in the Software Heritage archive.[16]

Software Heritage’s repository holds today over 143 million software projects, with an archive of over 9.1 billion unique source files as of October 2020.[6]

Funding

Software Heritage is a non-profit organization, funded largely from donations from supporting sponsors, that include private companies, public bodies and academic institutions.[17]

Software Heritage also seeks support for funding third parties interested in contributing to its mission. A grant from NLNet [18] funded the work of Octobus [19] and Tweag [20] that led to rescuing 250.000 Mercurial repositories phased out from Bitbucket.[21]

A grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funds experts to develop new connectors for expanding coverage of the Software Heritage Archive [22]

Awards

In 2016 Software Heritage received the best community project award at Paris Open Source Summit 2016.[23][24]

In 2019 Software Heritage received the award of Academic Initiative from the Pôle Systematic.[25]

References

  1. ^ a b "Collect, organise, preserve and share the Software Heritage of mankind" (PDF). Software Heritage. 30 June 2016. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  2. ^ a b UNESCO. "Software Heritage". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  3. ^ Brown, Paul (30 June 2016). "Software Heritage: Creating a safe haven for software". Boing Boing. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  4. ^ Jost, Clémence (1 July 2016). "Open source: lancement de Software Heritage, la plus grande bibliothèque de codes source de la planète". Archimag. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  5. ^ a b Abramatic, Jean-François; Di Cosmo, Roberto; Zacchiroli, Stefano (1 October 2018). "Building the Universal Archive of Source Code Journal Article". Communications of the ACM. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  6. ^ a b c "Software Heritage Archive". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  7. ^ "Software Heritage Persistent Identifiers". Software Heritage. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  8. ^ "At ENEA the first institutional mirror of Software Heritage". ENEA. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  9. ^ "FossID establishes first independent mirror of world's larges source code archive". FossID. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  10. ^ Moody, Lyn (30 June 2016). "Software Heritage, the "Library of Alexandria of software," launches today". Ars Technica. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  11. ^ Brogan, Jacob (30 June 2016). "Introducing Software Heritage, the Library of Alexandria for Code". Slate. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  12. ^ UNESCO. Director-General, 2009-2017 (Bokova, I.G.) (3 April 2020). "Discours de la Directrice générale de l'UNESCO, Irina Bokova, à l'occasion de la signature de l'accord entre l'UNESCO et INRIA portant sur la préservation et le partage du patrimoine logiciel" (Press release). Paris: UNESCO. Retrieved 2020-11-03.{{cite press release}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ "National Plan for Open Science" (PDF). Ouvrir La Science. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  14. ^ "Experts call for greater recognition of software source code as heritage for sustainable development" (Press release). Paris: UNESCO. 16 November 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  15. ^ "Paris Call on software source code as heritage for sustainable development". Paris: UNESCO. February 2019. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  16. ^ "GitHub Archive Program". November 2019. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  17. ^ "Software Heritage Sponsors". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  18. ^ "NLNet Software Heritage grant". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  19. ^ "Augmenting Software Heritage archiving capabilities". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  20. ^ "Long-term reproducibility with Nix and Software HERITAGE". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  21. ^ "Announcing the Mercurial public Bitbucket archive". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  22. ^ Sloan Foundation. "Excited to support Software Heritage". Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  23. ^ Les Acteurs du Libre - Précédents Lauréats at the Wayback Machine (archived 18 January 2019)
  24. ^ "Paris Open Source Summit 2016 : Prix Acteurs du Libre : et les gagnants sont..." Programmez! (in French). 17 November 2016. Retrieved 28 June 2019.
  25. ^ @Pole_Systematic (27 June 2019). "Convention @Pole_Systematic le Trophée Prix Initiative académique est remis @SWHeritage" (Tweet) – via Twitter.


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