I was very proud to be offered the chance to give a quote for the Software Heritage project, both because Roberto Di Cosmo is a friend of mine, and because I was the first manager of a software company – believing and investing in open source – to add the quote among many authoritative open source testimonials.
The main ambition of the project is “to collect, preserve, and share all software that is publicly available in source code form”. In the project mission you can read that “software is an essential part of our lives”, “software is fragile” and the reference to the Library of Alexandria of Software is not made by chance.
In the near future we will have a unique reference database of all source code, a tool for new software projects and a research instrument for computer science.
As of today, Software Heritage has collected about 22.800.000 software projects and less than 2.7 billion source files, and it’s growing every day. It’s the biggest collection of source code in the world!
This is my quote supporting the project:
“The challenge for an Information Technology industry lies in the preparation of excellence. To achieve this you need to master technologies, be free and make decisions quickly. Software availability is crucial and open source fosters the gain of knowledge, introducing diversity as an opportunity. Sharing ideas and artifacts, collaborating, adopting an open and multidisciplinary approach, help you find and give value to both businesses and people! It’s our history, it’s our present, it’s our future. The Software Heritage project is a key step to preserve software and make it accessible as a cornerstone of the entire body of knowledge, both for industry and society.”
In Wikipedia you can find now more information about Software Heritage project.