| Logo Alt: | Software Heritage logo |
| Founder: | Roberto DiCosmo, Stefano Zacchiroli |
| Type: | Nonprofit |
| Headquarters: | Inria |
| Location: | Rocquencourt, France |
| Leader Title2: | Scientific Advisors |
| Leader Name2: | Gérard Berry Jean-François Abramatic Julia Lawall Serge Abiteboul |
| Affiliations: | Inria |
| Staff: | 13 |
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 nonprofit multistakeholder 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.[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 was opened at UNESCO headquarters.
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.
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.
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]