GitHub joins forces to preserve source code

The mission of Software Heritage is to collect, preserve and share all the publicly available source code. With more than 6.4 billion source files from more than 91 million projects, including Debian, GitHub, GitLab, Gitorious, GoogleCode, GNU, Python Package Index and more, the Software Heritage archive has the unique ability to retrace the detailed history of revisions of all versions of the code it contains.

Today, we are delighted to announce that GitHub will join forces with Software Heritage in the urgent effort to archive and preserve humankind’s source code.

The partnership we are establishing will allow to improve the efficiency of the process of archiving in Software Heritage the software projects hosted on GitHub, through the GitHub Archive Program and dedicated support from GitHub’s teams.

It will also facilitate the implementation of the Software Heritage Acquisition Process, developed in collaboration with UNESCO and the University of Pisa to recover landmark legacy source code.

We are grateful to GitHub for showing they do care about our software heritage,  and we look forward to see all forges follow this example.