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