International Archives Day
We are delighted to celebrate the International Archives Day. Launched on June 9th 2007, this day turned into a whole week in 2019 and is meant to remind all of us of the importance of archives for keeping the memories of our society.
Software Heritage contributes to this mission building the long-term universal source code archive: we collect, preserve and share the source code of all software publicly available, as it contains a growing amount of our collective knowledge.
The Software Heritage archive is unique for several reasons, let’s recall some of them here :
- it stores all the source code and its development history in a uniform, technology-neutral global Merkle graph, that provides, together with the growing mirror network, a long term archive and a transparent source of trust
- it provides uniform, technology-independent intrinsic identifiers to track source code artifacts at all levels (file, directory, revision, release, snapshot) through the SWHID identifiers
Today, the source code archive main page shows that the Software Heritage archive contains 10,5 billion unique source files from more than 2,2 billion unique commits coming from over 160 million projects collected worldwide, making the Software Heritage archive the largest collection of source code ever created.
You can help in this mission too: save research software, rescue legacy code, help broaden the archive coverage, spread the word, or make a donation!