Keynote Speakers
Title: Towards A New Era for Software Engineering
Prof. Roberto Di Cosmo, Univeristy Paris City, and founder of the Software Heritage Project
Abstract: Open Source is at the heart of our digital society and embodies a growing part of our technical and organisational knowledge. It speeds up innovation, but also raises key challenges about the quality, evolution and security of the many components that are put together in modern software systems: how to be sure that the source code of a key module we use will be still there when we need it in the future? Can software engineering studies take advantage from, and improve the quality of the massive amount of information that is available about hundreds of millions of software projects worldwide?
In this talk we will present an update on Software Heritage, a groundbreaking non profit initiative launched by Inria in 2016 in partnership with UNESCO to collect, preserve and share all publicly available software in source code form. Software Heritage has already built the larges public archive, with more than 25 billion files from more than 380 million software origins, collected from more than 5000 different code hosting and distribution platforms.
After ten years of work, we show concrete examples of how this is much more than an archive: it is the Very Large Telescope that we need to explore the galaxy of software development at a global scale.