Roberto Di Cosmo

👥 2 conferences
🎤 2 talks
📅 Years active: 2017 to 2021

Biography

Roberto Di Cosmo is a Computer Science full professor at University Paris Diderot, now on leave at Inria to lead the Software Heritage universal archive for software source code, in collaboration with UNESCO. He spent over 30 years in research and education and over 20 years advocating, supporting and contributing to Free and Open Source Software, as well as Open Access, and now Open Science.

He is a trustee of the IMDEA Software institute, and member of the national committee for Open Science in France. His 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 has published over 20 international journals articles and 50 international conference articles. In 2008, he has created and coordinated the european research project Mancoosi, that brought together 10 partners to improve the quality of package-based open source software systems. A long term Free Software advocate, he contributes 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.

— biography from FOSDEM 2021
https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/speaker/roberto_di_cosmo/

Conferences

2 known conferences

👥 FOSDEM 2021 📅 06 Feb 2021

🎤 Archiving, referencing and citing research software in Software Heritage
06 Feb 2021 show details

👥 FOSDEM 2017 📅 04 Feb 2017

🎤 Software Heritage
04 Feb 2017 show details

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: Stefano Zacchiroli