computer science

Software Heritage

Software Heritage is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Software Heritage rather than just read about it. In short: Software Heritage is a non-profit organization which provides a service for archiving and referencing historical and contemporary software — with a focus on human readable source code. The site was unveiled in 2016 by Inria and is supported by UNESCO.

Software Heritage — illustration

Key takeaways

Software Heritage belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Software Heritage to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Software Heritage from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Software Heritage is a non-profit organization which provides a service for archiving and referencing historical and contemporary software — with a focus on human readable source code. The site was unveiled in 2016 by Inria  and is supported by UNESCO. The project itself is structured as a non‑profit multi‑stakeholder initiative. The stated mission of Software Heritage is to collect, preserve and share all software that is publicly available in source code form, with the goal of building a common, shared infrastructure at the service of industry, research, culture and society as a whole. Software source code is collected by crawling code hosting platforms, like GitHub, GitLab.com or Bitbucket, and packages archives, like npm or PyPI, and ingested into a special data structure, a Merkle DAG, that is the core of the archive. Each artifact in the archive is associated with a SoftWare Hash IDentifier (SWHID). In order to increase the chances of preserving the Software Heritage archive over the long term, a mirror program was established in 2018, joined by ENEA and FossID as of October 2020.

History Development of Software Heritage began at Inria under the direction of computer scientists Roberto Di Cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli in early 2015, and the project was officially announced to the public on June 30, 2016.

In 2017 Inria signed an agreement with UNESCO for the long-term preservation of software source code and for making it widely available, in particular through the Software Heritage initiative. In June 2018, the Software Heritage Archive was opened at UNESCO headquarters. On July 4, 2018, Software Heritage was included in the French National Plan for Open Science. In October 2018, the strategy and vision underlying the mission of Software Heritage were published in Communications of the ACM. In November 2018, a group of forty international experts met at the invitation of Inria and UNESCO, which led to the publication in February 2019 of Paris Call: Software Source Code as Heritage for Sustainable Development. In November 2019, Inria signed an agreement with GitHub to improve the archival process for GitHub-hosted projects in the Software Heritage archive. As of October 2020, Software Heritage's repository held over 143 million software projects in an archive of over 9.1 billion unique source files.

Funding Software Heritage is a non-profit organization, funded largely from donations from supporting sponsors, that include private companies, public bodies and academic institutions. Software Heritage also seeks support for funding third parties interested in contributing to its mission. A grant from NLnet funded the work of Octobus and Tweag that led to rescuing 250.000 Mercurial repositories phased out from Bitbucket. A grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funds experts to develop new connectors for expanding coverage of the Software Heritage Archive

Development and community The Software Heritage infrastructure is built transparently and collaboratively. All the software developed in the process is released as free and open-source software. An ambassador program has been announced in December 2020 with the stated goal to grow the community of users and contributors.

Awards In 2016, Software Heritage received the best community project award at Paris Open Source Summit 2016. In 2019, Software Heritage received the award of Academic Initiative from the Pôle Systematic.

References

External links Official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Software Heritage

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Software Heritage claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Software Heritage before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Software Heritage ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Software Heritage

In research: Software Heritage appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Software Heritage in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Software Heritage is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Digital preservation, History of the Internet, Internet properties established in 2016, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Software Heritage outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Software Heritage in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Software Heritage means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Software Heritage out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Software Heritage in simple terms?

Why does Software Heritage matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Software Heritage?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Software Heritage.