Software Heritage: Building the Universal Software Archive

In the past few decades, software has become a critical part of every single bit of infrastructure running the world, from the tiniest devices we embed in our bodies to improve our health, to the biggest human creations. Software is the key to accessing all the digital information we're constantly creating, and therefore is an essential part of our cultural heritage. But software is just a bunch of bits. Unlike antique stone carvings, software gets lost, deleted, or corrupted.

Software Heritage has set out to build the biggest archive of free software ever conceived. Our mission is to collect, preserve, organise and facilitate the sharing of all the available free software. We are laying down foundations on which a wealth of applications can be built, ranging from cultural heritage, to research and industry.

We started working in May 2015, and (as of April 2016) we have archived 2.2 billion unique files, more than 480 million project revisions across more than 16 million data sources, among which Debian source packages from snapshot.debian.org, public GitHub repositories, and the GNU project's FTP archive.

This presentation will cover in more detail the why and the how of Software Heritage, as well as opportunities for the community to help us fulfill our goals.

• Slides
• Video