Stefano Zacchiroli

The Great Library of Source Code

Software Heritage collects, preserves, and shares software source code from major software development forges, free software distributions, package manager repositories, and more. As such, Software Heritage is the premier digital preservation initiative whose goal encompasses the long-term archival of free software commons for generations to come.
The Software Heritage archive is the largest publicly accessible archive of software source code, having collected 10 billion unique source code files and 2 billion unique commits from more than 160 million software projects.
This talk will provide an update about the Software Heritage project, focusing on increased archive coverage, integration with other initiatives, and way to practically use the archive, for both end users and developers.

The ambition of the Software Heritage project is to collect, preserve, and share the entire body of free software that is published on the Internet in source code form, together with its development history.

Since its public announcement in 2016, the project has assembled the largest collection of freely available software source code for about 4 billion unique source code files and 900 million commits, coming from more than 60 million projects.

Initially focused on the collection and preservation goals -- which were at the time urgent, due to the recurrent disappearances of development forges -- Software Heritage has since rolled out several mechanisms to peruse its archive, making progress on the sharing goal.

In this talk, we will review the status of the Software Heritage project, emphasizing how users and developers can, today, benefit from the availability of a great public library of source code.

A well-known obligation in some FOSS licenses is the requirement to provide "complete corresponding source code" (CCSC). After the initial collection and packaging of the CCSC, its provision imposes a burden that may persist for a very long time. Ensuring that the CCSC is always available is not a simple matter, especially considering that the original development team might change structure, people might be replaced or change roles, legal entities may disappear, etc.

In this talk we will present the possibility of using Software Heritage, an independent, non-profit third party, in order to outsource CCSC provision. As part of the exploration, we will review the legal obligations in popular copyleft licenses, explain the burden of long-term CCSC hosting, describe the hosting infrastructure in place, and propose a publishing workflow that might help FOSS producers painlessly comply with the licenses.

Other people: Alexios Zavras

[Software Heritage](https://www.softwareheritage.org/), the universal source code archive, was announced to the public in 2016. During DebConf in Cape Town, we opened [our own source code](https://forge.softwareheritage.org/) to the world. Since then, we have [opened up our API to the public](https://archive.softwareheritage.org/), and Inria, our umbrella institution, [signed an agreement on software preservation with UNESCO](http://en.unesco.org/news/agreement-software-preservation-signed-unesco). So far, we have archived more than 3 billion source files, spanning almost 800 million revisions across 60 million projects. Our primary focus was the archival of version control systems, as this is where the history of software is being preserved right now and will be in the future. We have now laid out most of the ground work, and our infrastructure is (mostly) humming along, so we're ready to go further and to take in contributions from the community ! We want to give a status update on the last few months of development, and to show the areas with which we would welcome help from the community: listing new data sources, archiving Linux distributions, ... The sky is the limit!

Other people: Nicolas Dandrimont

The Software Commons is the vast body of human knowledge embedded in software source code that has been made publicly available and can be freely altered and reused. Free software constitutes the bulk of it. Sadly we seem to be at increasing risk of losing this precious heritage built by the Free Software community over the paste decades: once 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 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. Although still in Beta, Software Heritage has already archived more than 3 billion unique source code files and 700 million unique commits, spanning more than 50 million Free Software projects from major software development hubs, GNU/Linux distributions, and upstream software collections.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) constitutes the bulk of the Software Commons, and is at the heart of our digital society. We discuss why and how the Software Heritage project is taking over the mission of ensuring that this precious body of knowledge will be preserved over time and made available to all.

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: code hosting sites shut down when their popularity decreases, tapes of ancient versions of our toolchain (bit-)rot in basements, etc.

The ambitious goal of the Software Heritage 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 700 million unique commits, spanning more than 45 million FOSS projects from major software development hubs, GNU/Linux distributions, and upstream software collections.

Software Heritage is developed transparently as a collaborative project and all its own source code is available as FOSS under copyleft licenses. Currently incubated by Inria, the project will graduate soon to an independent charitable, nonprofit organization.

Other people: Roberto Di Cosmo

The license compliance industry purportedly helps information technology companies and other actors to use publicly available software, and in particular free software, in a way that is compliant with the relevant free software licenses. In this talk we will review why the license compliance industry exists and discuss, from an external point of view, how it operates. We will then highlight some potential ethical issues on the current best practices for license compliance in the industry, and propose community-oriented alternatives that we can build, today, on top of the existing corpus of publicly available free software.

The FSF High Priority Projects List guides volunteers and supporters to projects where their skills can be utilized, whether they be in coding, graphic design, writing, or activism.

Members of the committee convened to revise the list will give an update on the review process so far, including some examples of suggestions received as part of the call for public feedback, and will invite audience discussion.

Other people: Benjamin Mako Hill Karen Sandler

The license compliance industry purportedly helps information technology companies and other actors to use publicly available software, and in particular free software, in a way that is compliant with the relevant free software licenses.

In this talk we will review why the license compliance industry exists and discuss, from an external point of view, how it operates. We will then highlight some potential ethical issues on the current best practices for license compliance in the industry, and propose community-oriented alternatives that we can build, today, on top of the existing corpus of publicly available free software.

What role have Free Software distributions played in making free software as popular as it is today? And what has that to do with the so-called "cloud" that seems to be slowly neutralizing all of the achievements made by free software over the past 30 years? How do free software distributions need to evolve in order to become powerful allies in the quest for a free "cloud," one in which users are empowered to the level of control they wish for over their own computing, without having to turn into full fledged DevOps?

The FSF High-Priority Projects List guides volunteers and supporters to projects where their skills can be utilized, whether they be in coding, graphic design, writing, or activism.

Members of the committee convened to revise the list will give an update on the review process so far, including some examples of suggestions received as part of the call for public feedback, and will invite audience discussion.

Other people: ginger coons Benjamin Mako Hill Karen Sandler

Throughout its 20-year history, Debian had to face a number of legal issues, in all fields of the so (improperly) called "Intellectual Property". From trademarks to patents, from copyright to export control and embargoes, Debian didn't miss a single pesky issue. In this talk we review some of the most relevant legal issues that Debian has faced in recent years and how the project has responded to them. Doing so is a chance not only to share legal best practices with other Free Software communities, but also to highlight the policy annoyances that widespread legal systems imposes on radical Free Software communities such as Debian.

Five of our speakers from the Legal and Policy Issues devroom have agreed to participate in a governance best practices roundtable. These practices may touch on contribution policy, review boards, policy manuals, licensing tools, trademark guidelines, etc.

Questions will be asked of the panelists to start the roundtable and the audience will also be encouraged to participate in order to have more interaction with the panelists. Karen Sandler will be the moderator.

Other people: Karen Sandler Christopher Webber Eileen Evans Tom Callaway Chris Aniszczyk

Several distribution projects have existing initiatives and programs in order to coordinate and/or fund local communities as well as shipping or producing promotional material, going to events to promote the project, etc... Some projects are currently looking into setting up something like this, and others are rethinking their current model. Those programs all have their differences, but achieve pretty similar goals. In this session, we will bring together a bunch of people from different projects who are in charge or actively participating in such initiatives, in order to briefly present what they are currently doing in their project and, more importantly, share experience about what has worked well and what hasn't in an open discussion session. Let's learn from each others' ideas and mistakes.

Other people: Christoph Wickert Donnie Berkholz Kostas Koudaras Laura Czajkowski Oliver Burger Petteri Räty