Organization:Software Heritage

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Short description: Public initiative for software archival
Software Heritage
Software Heritage logo
FormationJune 30, 2016; 7 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 archive.[6] Each artifact in the archive is associated with an identifier called a SWHID.[7]

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

History

Development of Software Heritage began at Inria under the direction of computer scientists Roberto Di Cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli in early 2015,[10] and the project was officially announced 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, the Software Heritage Archive [6] was opened at UNESCO headquarters.[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 were published in Communications of the ACM.[5]

In November 2018, a group of forty international experts met at the invitation of Inria and UNESCO,[14] which led to the publication in February 2019 of Paris Call: Software Source Code as Heritage for Sustainable Development.[15]

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

As of October 2020, Software Heritage’s repository held over 143 million software projects in an archive of over 9.1 billion unique source files.[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]

Development and Community

The Software Heritage infrastructure is built transparently and collaboratively. All the software developed in the process is released as Free and open-source software.[23] An ambassador program has been announced in December 2020 with the stated goal to grow the community of users and contributors.[24]

Awards

In 2016 Software Heritage received the best community project award at Paris Open Source Summit 2016.[25][26]

In 2019 Software Heritage received the award of Academic Initiative from the Pôle Systematic.[27]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Collect, organise, preserve and share the Software Heritage of mankind". 30 June 2016. https://www.softwareheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PressReleasePressKit-2016-06-30.en_.pdf. Retrieved 26 July 2016. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 UNESCO. "Software Heritage". https://en.unesco.org/softwareheritage. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  3. ↑ Brown, Paul (30 June 2016). "Software Heritage: Creating a safe haven for software". Boing Boing. http://boingboing.net/2016/06/30/software-heritage-creating-a.html. 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. http://www.archimag.com/demat-cloud/2016/07/01/open-source-software-heritage-archive-codes-source. Retrieved 27 July 2016. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Abramatic, Jean-François; Di Cosmo, Roberto; Zacchiroli, Stefano (1 October 2018). "Building the Universal Archive of Source Code Journal Article". Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/10/231366-building-the-universal-archive-of-source-code/fulltext. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Software Heritage Archive". http://archive.softwareheritage.org. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  7. ↑ "Software Heritage Persistent Identifiers". https://docs.softwareheritage.org/devel/swh-model/persistent-identifiers.html. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  8. ↑ "At ENEA the first institutional mirror of Software Heritage". https://www.enea.it/en/news-enea/news/technology-at-enea-the-first-european-institutional-mirror-of-software-heritage. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  9. ↑ "FossID establishes first independent mirror of world's larges source code archive". https://fossid.com/2018/12/06/fossid-establishes-first-independent-mirror-of-worlds-largest-source-code-archive/. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  10. ↑ Moody, Lyn (30 June 2016). "Software Heritage, the "Library of Alexandria of software," launches today". Ars Technica. http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/06/software-heritage-the-library-of-alexandria-of-software-launches-today/. Retrieved 26 July 2016. 
  11. ↑ Brogan, Jacob (30 June 2016). "Introducing Software Heritage, the Library of Alexandria for Code". Slate. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/06/30/software_heritage_from_inria_wants_to_preserve_old_versions_of_computer.html. 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.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  13. ↑ "National Plan for Open Science". https://cache.media.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/file/Recherche/50/1/SO_A4_2018_EN_01_leger_982501.pdf. 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. https://en.unesco.org/foss/paris-call-software-source-code. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  16. ↑ "GitHub Archive Program". November 2019. https://archiveprogram.github.com/. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  17. ↑ "Software Heritage Sponsors". https://www.softwareheritage.org/support/sponsors. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  18. ↑ "NLNet Software Heritage grant". https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage/. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  19. ↑ "Augmenting Software Heritage archiving capabilities". https://octobus.net/blog/2020-03-24-swh-partnership.html. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  20. ↑ "Long-term reproducibility with Nix and Software HERITAGE". https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-06-18-software-heritage. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  21. ↑ "Announcing the Mercurial public Bitbucket archive". https://octobus.net/blog/2020-08-05-bitbucket-public-archive.html. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  22. ↑ Sloan Foundation. "Excited to support Software Heritage". https://twitter.com/SloanFoundation/status/1263494778748010496. Retrieved 2 November 2020. 
  23. ↑ "Software Heritage licensing". https://www.softwareheritage.org/community/developers/. Retrieved 25 February 2021. 
  24. ↑ "Software Heritage Ambassadors". https://www.softwareheritage.org/community/ambassadors/. Retrieved 25 February 2021. 
  25. ↑
  26. ↑ "Paris Open Source Summit 2016 : Prix Acteurs du Libre : et les gagnants sont..." (in fr). 17 November 2016. https://www.programmez.com/actualites/paris-open-source-summit-2016-prix-acteurs-du-libre-et-les-gagnants-sont-25126. Retrieved 28 June 2019. 
  27. ↑ @Pole_Systematic (27 June 2019). "Convention @Pole_Systematic le Trophée Prix Initiative académique est remis @SWHeritage.". https://twitter.com/Pole_Systematic/status/1144308178420719616. 

External links




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