Software Heritage: preserving the world’s source code

SoftWare Heritage’s (SWH) mission is to build the universal archive of all available software source code, preserve the precious knowledge it contains, and make it widely accessible [Di Cosmo and Zacchiroli, 2017]. With this mission in mind, it now collects, preserves and shares source code, which is accessible on the browsable archive. Figure 1 shows the most recent capture of the archive’s size. 

Started over 5 years ago by Inria with support from UNESCO, Software Heritage is a non-profit initiative supported by a growing number of research institutions, industry players, and governmental bodies. SWH has a dedicated team who make sure that the infrastructure is running and capable of responding to multiple stakeholders in a variety of situations. All the code developed for SWH is released under a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license.

How does it work?

Archiving all the source code is a daunting task and there are different mechanisms put in place to ensure the preservation of source code from different types of origins. Archiving a repository from a forge isn’t the same action as archiving source code from a package manager. It becomes even harder when you realize that version control systems have evolved ...  

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Morane Gruenpeter, Inria research center, Software Heritage team