From the homepage:
We collect and preserve software in source code form, because software embodies our technical and scientific knowledge and humanity cannot afford the risk of losing it.
Software is a precious part of our cultural heritage. We curate and make accessible all the software we collect, because only by sharing it we can guarantee its preservation in the very long term.
(emphasis in original)
The project has already collected:
Even though we just got started, we have already ingested in the Software Heritage archive a significant amount of source code, possibly assembling the largest source code archive in the world. The archive currently includes:
- public, non-fork repositories from GitHub
- source packages from the Debian distribution (as of August 2015, via the snapshot service)
- tarball releases from the GNU project (as of August 2015)
We currently keep up with changes happening on GitHub, and are in the process of automating syncing with all the above source code origins. In the future we will add many more origins and ingest into the archive software that we have salvaged from recently disappeared forges. The figures below allow to peek into the archive and its evolution over time.
The charters of the planned working groups:
Extending the archive
- Source Discovery and Ingestion (SODI), planned
- Metadata and Linked Data (MELD), planned
Evolving the archive
- Modeling and Ingesting Version control systems (MIV), planned
- Distribution, Replication and Query (DIREQ), planned
Connecting the archive
- Reproducibility of Software (REOS), planned
- Open Access and Data (OPAD), planned
Using the archive
- Scientific API (SAPI), planned
- Ethical and Legal Issues and Environment (ELIE), planned
on quick review did not seem to me to address the indexing/semantic challenges that searching such an archive will pose.
If you are familiar with the differences in metacharacters between different Unix programs, that is only a taste of the differences that will be faced when searching such an archive.
Looking forward to learning more about this project!