Software Heritage

Software Heritage

Software Heritage is an open archive of software source code and development history. It preserves and indexes publicly available source code and its development history over time across multiple code hosting platforms and version control systems.
Development Version Control
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Software Heritage: Open Archive for Software Source Code and Development History

A comprehensive repository of open source software, preserving publicly available source code and its development history across multiple platforms and version control systems.

What is Software Heritage?

Software Heritage is a non-profit initiative started in 2016 to collect, preserve, and make easily accessible the source code of all software that is publicly available. Its mission is to become an exhaustive archive and library of software source code to serve the needs of science, culture, and industry.

Software Heritage archives software source code from many major code hosting and development platforms such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, SourceForge, Debian, and GNU Savannah. It retrieves their public code repositories and associated development history across all available versions over time. This data is stored in a universal, deduplicated data model that links code origins and development history into a single graph structure.

The archive can be queried through a web interface or API to search for code and explore its development. All data collected by Software Heritage is freely available to the public under open licenses. The project is supported by funding from public institutions in France and Europe to serve the public good by preserving an essential part of humanity's digital science, technology, and culture for future generations.

Software Heritage Features

Features

  1. Comprehensive archive of publicly available source code
  2. Tracks the development history and evolution of software over time
  3. Supports many major code hosting platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc
  4. Powerful search and query capabilities
  5. Web API for programmatic access
  6. Web UI for browsing and visualizing software evolution
  7. Integrates with popular developer tools like Git
  8. Preserves vulnerable, abandoned, or taken-down software projects
  9. Deduplication of code to save storage space

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Massive archive of open source code for research and reuse

Traceability and attribution for software origin and history

Discover forgotten or abandoned projects

Find examples and prior art easily

Study software evolution over decades

Ensure preservation even if host sites disappear

Cons

Not all open source projects included

Some proprietary code not archived

UI and search could be improved

Documentation could be more extensive

Storage infrastructure requires significant resources

Official Links

Official Website
https://www.softwareheritage.org

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