The 2024 Roadmap Unveiled: A Vision for Software Heritage
The essential mission at Software Heritage is to build the long-term universal source code archive, by collecting, preserving and sharing the source code of all software publicly available.
Since the beginning, we have faced complex technical challenges to build a robust, scalable and resilient infrastructure. 2023 has been a decisive year to make significant progress towards scalability and sustainability for the long term.
While we continue our long term effort on the core infrastructure, 2024 marks a turning point in the way we are building the technical roadmap: from this year, we are adding a project-oriented layer to guide development and operations, in order to focus on products and features driven by key user communities.
The 2024 roadmap will focus on adding features to the following components:
– SWH Core Platform: Regroups the SWH Core features and APIs, potentially shared between several products
– SWH Archive WebApp: The SWH web application
– Softwareheritage.org Website: SWH website
– Documentation: Software Heritage documentation, user support and help-related processes
– SWH Scanner: A CLI tool to analyze code bases and compare them with source code artifacts archived by Software Heritage. This year, Octobus has received a grant from NGI Search in order to improve the swh-scanner CLI to provide a full-featured product ready for regular use.
– SWH Sec: The SWHSec project is part of a National Research and Innovation Program funded by the National Cybersecurity Strategy at Campus Cyber. It brings together eight research teams specialized in security, software engineering and open-source software to leverage the Software Heritage infrastructure to build tools for cybersecurity. More info.
– Mirrors: In order to prevent information loss, and simplify access to humankind’s software heritage, we are building an international network of mirrors. A mirror is a full copy of the Software Heritage universal source code archive, operated in agreement with, but independently from the Software Heritage organization. More info.
The Software Heritage Technical Roadmap provides insight into numerous innovative functionalities currently under development, and awaiting integration into production. The roadmap not only provides insight into the evolving landscape of the archive but also serves as a guide for potential contributors seeking opportunities to align with the mission. Some tasks even come with limited funding, providing concrete avenues for engagement.
As the Software Heritage archive continues to expand, there’s an open invitation for all to join in this long term mission: from exploring sponsorship and mirror programs to safeguarding endangered repositories and curating crucial legacy code. Engagement in the ambassador program expands outreach efforts, raising awareness on a larger platform. Whether through sponsorship, tackling scientific challenges, contributing code to the open-source infrastructure, or advocating for the cause, each action, regardless of scale, significantly furthers the mission of Software Heritage.