Software Heritage: Scholarly and Educational Synergies with Preserving Our Software Commons

Abstract

embedded in software source code, that is publicly available and can be freely altered and reused. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) constitutes the bulk of it. Sadly we seem to be at increasing risk of losing this precious heritage built by the FOSS community over the paste decades: code hosting sites shut down when their popularity decreases, tapes of ancient versions of our toolchain (bit-)rot in basements, etc. The ambitious goal of the Software Heritage project is to contribute to address this risk, by collecting, preserving, and sharing all publicly available software in source code form. Together with its complete development history, as captured by state-of-the art version control systems.