Recently, I decided to join the Software Heritage (SwH) Ambassador program. This is an effort to build a group of volunteers that supports both the SwH organization and its community in different areas like awareness, communication, community growth, ecosystem development, technical excellence, etc. The SwH Ambassadors Program is currently formed by around 30 people with solid background in any of the four main knowledge areas the program is built around: academia, culture, public administrations and industry.
It is an honour for me to support this mission as Software Heritage Ambassador.
Software Heritage’s mission
Back on June 30th 2016, Software Heritage (SwH) was announced, with the following mission:
“At Software Heritage, our primary objective is to collect, preserve, and share all publicly available software in source code form. Just as libraries and archives safeguard books and manuscripts, Software Heritage acts as a digital repository, safeguarding the building blocks of our digital world. From open-source projects to historical
software, Software Heritage ensures that no piece of code is lost to time.”
Software Heritage’s “ambition is to collect, preserve and share all publicly available source code” for public scrutiny which is a noble, hard and necessary task that requires effort and support.
An essential infrastructure for industry
There are several aspects of Software Heritage’s mission that I consider essential for the industry:
- “Software Heritage will provide a universal, vendor-neutral, persistent reference software archive. On this foundation, a wealth of new applications will emerge, improving all aspects of the software process, and leading to better software for everybody.”
- “Because industry cannot afford to lose track of any part of its source code, we track software origin, history, and evolution. Software Heritage will provide unique software identifiers, intrinsically bound to software components, ensuring persistent traceability across future development and organizational changes.”
There are three areas where SwH’s mission is being increasingly perceived as potentially critical by the industry:
1.- Software compliance: where Software Heritage archive is being used as a reference point of “single source of truth” of curated DD.BB. in software compliance solutions. The future offers countless possibilities in this area, specially for tools developers, compliance solutions providers as well as for downstream consumers.
2.- Security: it is not trivial today to understand the presence and impact of complex bugs across different software projects as well as how remedies for those are adopted and spread across entire projects or simply across stable branches, for instance. The availability of an universal, vendor neutral, persistent archive can become part of any
significant improvement in this front.
3.- Software supply chain: the existence of SwH simplifies different activities and processes that relies on the inspection and analysis of software origins and their evolution during long periods of time. Products that require long term maintenance and support, like those in the industrial, automotive or civil infrastructure industries, as well
as safety critical software, to just put two examples, can directly benefit from Software Heritage organization activities.
The industry moves so fast that new potential use cases emerge faster than we can process them. There are plenty of additional examples where SwH’s infrastructure and service could be part of the solution in these three I just mentioned. But there are other areas where this organization can play a role, like AI generated code, software
certification (mission critical, for instance), merge and acquisitions…
Support Software Heritage!
The open nature, vendor neutral and community approach of Software Heritage puts it in a unique position for the industry to participate and rely on it as essential part of their software strategy, adding value at the same time to the other focus areas of the organization (research, culture and public administrations), making their contributions valuable not just to themselves, their partners and customers, but also to our society as a whole. Software Heritage is built with the support of a community, from donors to users, industries to public bodies. Together, we’re creating an essential resource.
Please reach out to me if you are interested in learning about how can the industry and public administrations interact make a good usage of the archive and support Software Heritage’s mission. I will be providing talks in English and Spanish as well as generating content about it as well in the coming months, together with my fellow Ambassadors. As a Software Heritage Ambassador, I’m excited to see more people join us
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