Microsoft Supports the Software Heritage Project

As of today, INRIA — better known as the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation — launched Software Heritage, an international open project dedicated to collecting, organizing, preserving and making easily accessible any already publicly available source code.

Software Heritage has already collected more than 20 million software projects, archiving more than two billion and a half unique source files. Together, with all of the source files development history, this project is already the richest collection of source code on the planet.

Microsoft has been involved in open source initiatives by enabling, integrating, releasing and contributing to many open source projects and communities for well over a decade.

Microsoft Azure has opened up over 200 repositories on GitHub, and has over 2,000 engineers engage in this community alone. Through this deep involvement in open source, Microsoft has undergone massive culture transformations driven by an evolving workforce.

More than ever before, it remains critical to reflect and learn, and continue to think about how we curate and conserve human knowledge — in the form of code — for future of generations. We strongly believe that Software Heritage will be a great tool to help today’s generations of developers find and re-use code worldwide.

Through this partnership, we are supporting the Software Heritage project with a Microsoft Research grant program, providing the Azure infrastructure to ensure the data is highly available, allowing the project to grow and scale and continues to flourish.

We are proud to be one of the first industry partners for this initiative, happy to be alongside other great partners from academia and open source communities and excited to see what’s in store for the future of open source and Software Heritage.

-Jean Paoli, General Manager, Microsoft Corp.

Want to learn more? Read more from the INRIA press release and check out the Software Heritage website.