Close

Content policy

Applicable law

The archive of Software Heritage is under the responsibility of Inria, the french national institute for research in computer science and control.

As such, the applicable law is the French law.

Data storage

Software Heritage may use third-party vendors and hosting partners to provide the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the Software Heritage services.

Personal data

The Software Heritage archive collects publicly available source code, and its development history, from a variety of public sources, such as the GitHub, GitLab.com or Bitbucket code hosting platforms, package repositories like Npm or PyPI, and open access repositories like HAL or Zenodo. Personal information may be contained in the source code or in the development history, and may hence be collected by the archive. All the content of the archive being publicly accessible, you may access this information directly from the archive.

RGPD information notice

In accordance with Article 14 of the Regulation on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), we provide the following information regarding this data collection: 

  1. The representative of the data controller is the CEO of Inria
  2. The Data Protection Officer (DPO) appointed by Inria can be contacted  electronically at dpo@inria.fr or by post at : La déléguée à la protection des données Inria, 2004 route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex
  3. The purpose of this processing is to archive in the long term all publicly available software in source code form, with the aim of preserving humankind’s software heritage, and in particular to make scientific and historical research on this heritage possible
  4. The legal basis for this processing is the execution of a public interest task
  5. The categories of personal data are name, e-mail address, pseudonym of the developer
  6. The recipients of your data are the team managing the SoftwareHeritage infrastructure, the hosting companies of the storage solutions and the managers of the Software Heritage mirrors
  7. Your data is transferred outside of Europe for the hosting of the Software Heritage storage solutions and mirrors
  8. Due to the long-term archiving mission, and for historical purposes, your data will be kept without time limit
  9. You have the right to access your data. You have the right to request changes in the way your data is presented by the Software Heritage archive, see the “Name change requests” section below”, but we are unable to change or delete data in the software development history – the version control systems we archive, like Git, are designed to maintain a record. If you have any questions about the processing of your data in this scheme, you can contact the DPO
  10. If, after having contacted us, you feel that your data protection rights have not been respected or that the processing does not comply with data protection rules, you may submit a complaint to the CNIL 
  11. This personal data is collected from platforms for collaborative development, archiving and/or distribution of software, as well as infrastructures for the publication and dissemination of scientific research results. It is derived from publicly available sources
  12. This processing does not result in any profiling or automated decision-making about you based on your data and the processing thereof. 
Name change requests

People change their names and/or email addresses for many reasons. If you wish to change the name and/or email address that Software Heritage displays in association to archived version control system objects (such as commits) that you have authored, you can do so by contacting the Data Protection Officer (see contact information provided above). In your request you should specify the following information:

  • The (old) email used to author the relevant version control system objects

  • The (new) name and/or (new) email address you would like Software Heritage to associate to such objects

Takedown notices

The Software Heritage archive collects publicly available source code, and its development history, from a variety of public sources. Software Heritage does not perform any screening of the collected source code and development history, hence illicit content present therein may become part of the Software Heritage archive. Conformant to the applicable french law, Software Heritage and Inria won’t be liable for copyright infringement as long as they offer legitimate right-holders a means to request it to be taken down. Notice that the terms of the french law are different from the ones found in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act: in particular, no take down counter-notice mechanism is mandated by the law.

To request the removal of a content from the Software Heritage archive, you must file a formal request containing all of the following informations:

  1. the date of the request ;
  2. full identification
    • for a person: name, surname, activity, address, nationality, birth place and birth date;
    • for a legal entity: nature of the legal entity, name, address of headquarters and legal representative;
  3. description of the infringing information and its precise location ;
  4. the reasons why the content should be taken down, including the supporting articles of law and full justification of the alleged facts ;
  5. copy of the correspondence sent to the original author or editor of the allegedly infringing content, asking for its removal or modification; or justification of why they could not be contacted.

Please send your request by e-mail to takedown@softwareheritage.org

You can also send it by physical mail to the following address

Inria
Direction aux Affaires Juridiques
Domaine de Voluceau
Rocquencourt B.P. 105
78153 Le Chesnay Cedex
France