USP Lecture – Software Heritage: a revolutionary infrastructure for Open Science and Open Source

Roberto Di Cosmo (INRIA from IRIF/Université Paris Cité)

 

Open Science is a tidal wave that will have a deep and long lasting impact on the way we conduct, share and evaluate research. Awareness is rising about the fact that open source software has a key role to play, on par with open access to research articles and data, in the challenging endeavour of efficiently building a body of scientific knowledge as a commons to the service of society as a whole.

 

In today’s digital research landscape, software permeates every discipline, from he humanities to the hard sciences. To maintain the fabric of knowledge, address the mandate of Open Science, and foster reproducibility of research, it is imperative to have dependable preservation, identification, description and citation of all software artifact relevant for research.

 

In this talk we will survey recent policy news, report on ongoing national and international efforts, and explore in depth the approach taken by the Software Heritage initiative to preserve, reference and share all the publicly available source code. With over 22 billion unique source files from more than 340 million repositories, Software Heritage is the most extensive archive of source code ever built. It provides immediately actionable means to support the Software Pillar of Open Science, and opens new perspectives for massive code analysis and transparent AI.

 

Data: 27/03/2025 (quinta-feira) – 10h 

 

Roberto Di Cosmo‘s research activity spans theoretical computing, functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic, and, more recently, the new scientific problems posed by the general adoption of Free Software, with a particular focus on static analysis of large software collections.
He is a long term Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and software. He created in October 2007 the Free Software thematic group of Systematic, that helped fund over 50 Open Source research and development collaborative projects for a consolidated budget of over 200Me. From 2010 to 2018, he was director of IRILL, a research structure dedicated to Free and Open Source Software quality.
He created in 2015, and now directs Software Heritage, an initiative to build the universal archive of all the source code publicly available, in partnership with UNESCO.

Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa e Inovação