Formation | June 30, 2016 |
---|---|
Founder |
Roberto Di Cosmo, Stefano Zacchiroli |
Type | Non‑profit |
Headquarters | Inria |
Location | |
Scientific Advisors |
Gérard Berry Jean-François Abramatic Julia Lawall Serge Abiteboul |
Affiliations | Inria |
Staff | 13 |
Website |
softwareheritage |
Software Heritage is a non-profit organization which provides a service for archiving and referencing historical and contemporary software — with a focus on human readable source code. The site was unveiled in 2016 by Inria [1] and is supported by UNESCO. [2] [3] [4] The project itself is structured as a non‑profit multi‑stakeholder initiative.
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 packages 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 2023, the expansion of SWHID was changed from Software Heritage identifier to software hash identifier.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
{{
cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (
link)
Formation | June 30, 2016 |
---|---|
Founder |
Roberto Di Cosmo, Stefano Zacchiroli |
Type | Non‑profit |
Headquarters | Inria |
Location | |
Scientific Advisors |
Gérard Berry Jean-François Abramatic Julia Lawall Serge Abiteboul |
Affiliations | Inria |
Staff | 13 |
Website |
softwareheritage |
Software Heritage is a non-profit organization which provides a service for archiving and referencing historical and contemporary software — with a focus on human readable source code. The site was unveiled in 2016 by Inria [1] and is supported by UNESCO. [2] [3] [4] The project itself is structured as a non‑profit multi‑stakeholder initiative.
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 packages 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 2023, the expansion of SWHID was changed from Software Heritage identifier to software hash identifier.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
{{
cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (
link)