Software Heritage: a status update

Software Heritage, the universal source code archive, was announced to the public in 2016. During DebConf in Cape Town, we opened our own source code to the world. Since then, we have opened up our API to the public, and Inria, our umbrella institution, signed an agreement on software preservation with UNESCO.

So far, we have archived more than 3 billion source files, spanning almost 800 million revisions across 60 million projects. Our primary focus was the archival of version control systems, as this is where the history of software is being preserved right now and will be in the future. We have now laid out most of the ground work, and our infrastructure is (mostly) humming along, so we’re ready to go further and to take in contributions from the community !

We want to give a status update on the last few months of development, and to show the areas with which we would welcome help from the community: listing new data sources, archiving Linux distributions, … The sky is the limit!

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