Welcoming Sloan support to expand the Software Heritage archive
The mission of Software Heritage is to collect, preserve, and share all the publicly available source code. With more than 7 billion source files from more than 120 million projects, the Software Heritage archive has the unique ability to retrace the detailed history of revisions of all versions of the code it contains.
We’re delighted to announce a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to build a community of expert contributors and expand the Software Heritage Archive’s coverage.
The Software Heritage archive already contains a large amount of source code, notably from GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Our next step is to address the long tail of diverse software development platforms and version control systems used for publicly available source code
To this end, the Software Heritage modular architecture relies on two kinds of components, namely:
- Listers: specialized adaptors that allow Software Heritage to obtain the list of software projects present on a given platform
- Loaders: specialized translators that facilitate reading the version history contained in a version control system, and ingest it into the giant Merkle graph that underlies the Software Heritage archive.
Expert knowledge is required to build efficient and correct listers and loaders. Thanks to the Sloan Foundation, we now have some funding to support dedicated developers willing to contribute to Software Heritage’s long-term mission of collecting and preserving all software source code.
“The Software Heritage Archive is an important resource in software preservation, not just as a critical repository of cultural heritage, but also for historical and sociological studies of how software is produced and the identification of legacy vulnerabilities of critical systems that have evolved over time,” says Josh Greenberg, Program Director at the Sloan Foundation. “The Sloan Foundation is pleased to be able to support their vital work.”
Experts are invited to express their interest in participating by filling out this simple form. We’ll share further details soon.