The newly launched Software Heritage initiative is on a mission to collect and preserve software programs and libraries that are provided under open source licenses.
Most people don’t spend much time thinking about preserving technology heritage, but technology is no less part of our social fabric than paintings, sculptures, and handcrafts. Kudos to those who create museums — virtual or physical — to preserve these parts of human culture. People tend to think software repositories are forever, but then they turn around to find that Google Code and FreshMeat are gone.
The project plans to implement features to help the curious to search and explore software in its archive, which contains over 2 billion source files — and counting.
