Software Heritage: Preserving the Free Software Commons

 The Software Commons is the vast body of human knowledge embedded in
 software source code, that is publicly available and can be freely
 altered and reused.  Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) constitutes
 the bulk of it. Sadly we seem to be at increasing risk of losing this
 precious heritage built by the FOSS community over the paste decades:
 no longer popular code hosting sites shut down, tapes of ancient
 versions of our toolchain (bit-)rot in basements, etc.

 The ambitious goal of the [Software
 Heritage](https://www.softwareheritage.org) project is to contribute
 to address this risk, by collecting, preserving, and sharing *all*
 publicly available software in source code form. Together with its
 complete VCS development history. Forever, of course.

 By doing so Software Heritage will serve the needs of: Society, by
 preserving our collective technological heritage; Industry, by
 building the largest software provenance open database; Science, by
 assembling the largest curated archive for software research; and
 Education, by creating the ultimate anthology for programming
 curricula.

 Although still in Beta, Software Heritage has already archived more
 than 3 billion unique source code files and 650 million unique
 commits, spanning more than 25 million FOSS projects from major
 software development hubs, GNU/Linux distributions, and upstream
 software collections.