Hi, thank you.
I'm Nicolas Dandrimont and I will indeed be talking to you about
Software Heritage.
I'm a software engineer for this project.
I've been working on it for 3 years now.
And we'll see what this thing is all about.
[Mic not working]
I guess the batteries are out.
So, let's try that again.
So, we all know, we've been doing free software for a while,
that software source code is something special.
Why is that?
As Harold Abelson has said in SICP, his textbook on programming,
programs are meant to be read by people and then incidentally for machines to execute.
Basically, what software source code provides us is a way inside
the mind of the designer of the program.
For instance, you can have, you can get inside very crazy algorithms
that can do very fast reverse square roots for 3D, that kind of stuff
Like in the Quake 2 source code.
You can also get inside the algorithms that are underpinning the internet,
for instance seeing the net queue algorithm in the Linux kernel.
What we are building as the free software community is the free software commons.
Basically, the commons is all the cultural and social and natural resources
that we share and that everyone has access to.
More specifically, the software commons is what we are building
with software that is open and that is available for all to use, to modify,
to execute, to distribute.
We know that those commons are a really critical part of our commons.
Who's taking care of it?
The software is fragile.
Like all digital information, you can lose software.
People can decide to shut down hosting spaces because of business decisions.
People can hack into software hosting platforms and remove the code maliciously
or just inadvertently.
And, of course, for the obsolete stuff, there's rot.
If you don't care about the data, then it rots and it decays and you lose it.