Software Heritage
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| Formation | June 30, 2016 |
|---|---|
| Founder |
Roberto Di Cosmo Stefano Zacchiroli |
| Headquarters | Inria |
| Location | |
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Founders
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Roberto Di Cosmo Stefano Zacchiroli |
|
Scientific Advisors
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Gérard Berry Jean-François Abramatic Serge Abiteboul |
| Affiliations | Inria |
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Staff
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4 2 interns |
| Website | softwareheritage |
Software Heritage is an initiative whose goal is to collect, preserve, and share software code -- both freely licensed and not -- in a universal software storage archive.
Although started in 2015, the initiative was worked on as a research project for two years before that time. Software Heritage began public operations on June 30, 2016. It was formed under the auspices of the French research institute, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria), which hosts the initiative on its servers. The budget Inria is providing for the project is €500,000 over three years.
Software Heritage was founded by computer scientists Roberto Di Cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli. Its repository holds over 20 million software projects, with an archive of over 2.7 billion unique source files as of July 2016.
Additional sponsors of the Software Heritage initiative include Microsoft and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research's Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS).Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, GitHub, Jason Scott, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft among others have endorsed the project.
Software Heritage's goal is to preserve software in its original source code that is free/open source software (FOSS). The focus of the initiative is to collect, preserve, and share software that is across cultural heritage, industry, education, science, and research communities, with the concern that software that is made up of technical and scientific knowledge will be lost without preservation. The project came about because software code is seen as being even more vulnerable to corruption and obsolescence than typical archival holdings like books and other media like video and film.
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