Software is now a key component present in all aspects of our society. Its preservation has attracted growing attention over the past years within the digital preservation community. We claim that source code—the only representation of software that contains human readable knowledge—is a precious digital object that needs special handling: it must be a first class citizen in the preservation landscape and we need to take action immediately, given the increasingly more frequent incidents that result in permanent losses of source code collections. In this paper we present Software Heritage, an ambitious initiative to collect, preserve, and share the entire corpus of publicly accessible software source code. We discuss the archival goals of the project, its use cases and role as a participant in the broader digital preservation ecosystem, and detail its key design decisions. We also report on the project road map and the current status of the Software Heritage archive that, as of early 2017, has collected more than 3 billion unique source code files and 700 million commits coming from more than 50 million software development projects.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01590958/document

Software Heritage: Why and How to Preserve Software Source Code.

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. Software source code is a precious, unique form of knowledge. It can be readily translated into a form executable by a machine, and yet it is human readable: Harold Abelson wrote "Programs must be written for humans to read", 1 and source code is the preferred form for modification of software artefacts by developers. 2

/pdf/building-the-universal-archive-of-source-code-38jbazw12w.pdf

Building the universal archive of source code

Software is a fundamental pillar of modern scientific research, across all fields and disciplines. However, there is a lack of adequate means to cite and reference software due to the complexity of the problem in terms of authorship, roles, and credits. This complexity is further increased when it is considered over the lifetime of a software that can span up to several decades. Building upon the internal experience of Inria, the French research institute for digital sciences, we provide in this article a contribution to the ongoing efforts in order to develop proper guidelines and recommendations for software citation and reference. Namely, we recommend: first, a richer taxonomy for software contributions with a qualitative scale; second, to put humans at the heart of the evaluation; and third, to distinguish citation from reference.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02135891/document

Attributing and Referencing (Research) Software: Best Practices and Outlook From Inria

In the very broad scope addressed by digital preservation initiatives, a special place belongs to the scientific and technical artifacts that we need to properly archive to enable scientific reproducibility For these artifacts we need identifiers that are not only unique and persistent, but also support integrity in an intrinsic way They must provide strong guarantees that the object denoted by a given identifier will always be the same, without relying on third parties and external administrative processes In this article, we report on our quest for this identifiers for digital objects (IDOs), whose properties are different from, and complementary to, those of the various digital identifiers of objects (DIOs) that are in widespread use today We argue that both kinds of identifiers are needed and present the framework for intrinsic persistent identifiers that we have adopted in Software Heritage for preserving billions of software artifacts

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790/document

Identifiers for Digital Objects: the Case of Software Source Code Preservation

Scientific research not preserved in some form may be considered in the future to never have been done, so far as the historical record is concerned. Likewise, museological research and practice not shared is not fully or usefully done. Thus the rationale behind the Artefacts consortium and its annual meetings is to provide a forum for communication for people from a range of disciplines concerned with the material culture of science and technology. In 2011, Artefacts XVI at Museum Boerhaave in Leiden addressed the theme of “Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology.” Building on the research presented at the meeting, this volume will focus on the question of collecting post–World War II scientific and technological heritage and the equally challenging question of how such artifacts can be displayed and interpreted for diverse publics. However, this volume also has another aim, as indicated by the ambiguity of the title, Challenging Collections. In addition to examples of case studies, prominent historians and curators reflect on the nature of recent scientific and technological heritage and challenge the role of museum collections in the twenty-first century.

/pdf/challenging-collections-approaches-to-the-heritage-of-recent-wtx4kr9nms.pdf

Challenging Collections: Approaches to the Heritage of Recent Science and Technology (Artefacts 11)

Software is more than cards, tapes and disks; it is the meaning of the bits that they contain. To properly preserve the history of computing, we must preserve the software code, especially the source code, for analysis by future historians.

Leonard J. Shustek

Papers

What Should We Collect to Preserve the History of Software

What Should We Collect to Preserve the History of Software