FOSSID Establishes First Independent Mirror of World’s Largest Source Code Archive

FOSSID mirrors Software Heritage’s growing source code archive of 5 billon source code files, enabling continuous access to digital information

FOSSID and Software Heritage today announced that they have signed an agreement to establish the first independent mirror of the largest source code archive in the world.

5 Billion source code files and growing

Software Heritage collects, preserves, and shares software code (both freely and not freely licensed) in a universal software storage archive. FOSSID helps secure the archive in an independent mirror outside of the initial hosting at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria). To date, the archive holds 5.3 Billion source files from 86.4 Million projects, including Debian, HitHub, GitLab, Gitorious, GoogleCode, GNY, HAL, Inria, Python Package Index, and more.

Securing our digital heritage for the future

“The purpose of the archive is to structure and preserve knowledge, and enable continuous access to digital information”, said Professor Roberto Di Cosmo, founder and director of Software Heritage. “FOSSID shares this vision: by becoming the first independent mirror of our archive, it helps us ensure long-term archival and access to software source code, which is an important part of humankind’s scientific, technical and cultural heritage, and a stepping stone for scientific reproducibility.”

“We help companies make the most out of their free and open source (FOSS) software, and to achieve maximum adoption efficiency, making software provenance more traceable, integrated, and reusable, with an ability to know licensing and usage constraints, track security vulnerabilities, and assist in the discovery of prior code assets.”, said Oskar Swirtun, CEO at FOSSID. “It is in an industry-wide interest that we parter with Software Heritage to help preserve and make accessible all the software source code that lies at the heart of the digital revolution”.

Expanding the source code archive

Software Heritage is a non profit initiative that aims to serve the needs of cultural heritage, research and industry, by collecting, preserving and making accessible the source code of all available software. To this end, it is harvesting source code from a steadily growing list of software projects, development forges, and research archives.

Read more about the initiative at https://www.softwareheritage.org/, and http://www.fossid.com.