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Building the Universal Archive of Source Code

By Jean-François Abramatic, Roberto Di Cosmo, Stefano Zacchiroli
Communications of the ACM, October 2018, Vol. 61 No. 10, Pages 29-31
10.1145/3183558
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storage files, illustration — Credit: Andrey VP

Software is becoming the fabric that binds our personal and social lives, embodying a vast part of the technological knowledge that powers our industry and fuels innovation. Software is a pillar of most scientific research activities in all fields, from mathematics to physics, from chemistry to biology, from finance to social sciences. Software is also an essential mediator for accessing any digital information.

In short, a rapidly increasing part of our collective knowledge is embodied in, or dependent on, software artifacts. Our ability to design, use, understand, adapt, and evolve systems and devices on which our lives have come to depend relies on our ability to understand, adapt, and evolve the source code of the software that controls them.

Comments

Patricia Galloway

October 04, 2018 09:41

The Software Preservation Network is already active in the US, with funding from IMLS: http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/

Roberto Di Cosmo

October 04, 2018 12:27

Dear Patricia,
at Software Heritage, we are very well aware of the great work done by the Software Preservation Network (SPN): our roles are complementary and we actively collaborate with SPN on issues like metadata for describing software projects, and legal issues about archiving.

--
Roberto Di Cosmo

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