INRIA recently presented its "Software Heritage" program, which aims to bring together a maximum of free software in one place. But the institute will not be able to manage the task alone, it will need the help of partners to conceive what presents itself as an international project.
Currently, there are 22 million pieces of software and 2.5 billion source codes within Software Heritage. A situation that satisfies Antoine Petit, President and CEO of INRIA who recently shared "We decided to launch Software Heritage more than a year ago and we have shown its feasibility. This already makes it the source code archive the largest on the planet. "
But the project aims further, INRIA indicated that it wished to "preserve and disseminate the knowledge now encoded in the software. Our strategy is to quickly become an international distributed structure so as to ensure that if a partner fails, the others will take over. Rather than pretending that we are the best, let's build a system that will survive, because we can have faults and failures.
Microsoft is already participating in the project as its Cloud Azure infrastructures are made available.
For INRIA, the formed library "will allow us to preserve everything that exists in terms of source code for free software. But also to be always aware of what is being done. And to seek to improve quality source codes and to detect possible errors ".
