Gitorious content is safe thanks to the Archive Team

When we started Software Heritage we did not expect that publicly available source code was going to be endangered so quickly. Among other major source code hosters, Gitorious was already being taken down in mid 2015, before our initial infrastructure was ready!

Luckily fellow hackers of the Archive Team were already working full speed, and they managed to salvage Gitorious content in time.

Today we are happy to announce that a full copy of all Gitorious content at the time of the shutdown has been safely copied to our servers, increasing the number of Gitorious backups that currently exist in the wild. Special thanks go to Jason Scott and Astrid of Archive Team, for their help in retrieving the content.

While we have now retrieved the full Gitorious raw content—in the form of on-disk, bare Git repositories—we haven’t yet ingested it in the Software Heritage archive. This means that you will not find Gitorious content using our web search yet, unless the same content was also available from other software origins that we currently track (e.g., GitHub). We will progressively ingest Gitorious content in our archive over the upcoming months, and keep you posted via our blog.

Thanks again Archive Team, we owe you one!