NGI Zero grant for Software Heritage

Paris, March 26th 2020

This article is a reprint of the original press release by the Software Heritage Foundation.

We are delighted to announce today that Octobus and Tweag, with support from an European grant managed by NLnet, will contribute their expertise to Software Heritage’s long term mission to collect, preserve and share the source code of all software that is publicly available, a very important part of humankind’s heritage. This is an important step forward, as contributions from the community of experts is essential for achieving this ambitious goal.

Octobus is a company focusing on commercial support for the Mercurial source control system. They will improve Software Heritage capability to import Mercurial repositories, by developing specialized connectors that allow to efficiently archive software developed using the Mercurial version control system.

“We are happy to put ten years of Mercurial expertise at the service of a great mission”, says Pierre-Yves David, CEO of Octobus, “The experience gained in this process will allow us, Mercurial developers, to better understand our user base.”

Tweag is a software innovation lab that helps deep tech startups quickly scale their engineering performance and execute on high-risk, high-reward projects with confidence. They will develop the components needed to ensure that the source code used to build packages using the Nix and Guix functional package managers is systematically archived in the Software Heritage archive.

“Collaborating with Software Heritage to combine Nix with a long-term source code archive is really the natural step forward”, said Mathieu Boespflug, CEO of Tweag.

The core mission of the NLnet Foundation is to support independent organisations and people that contribute to an open information society and to a safe, secure and open internet.

“The Next Generation Internet Initiative is a significant R&D effort backed by the European Commission to make the internet more trustworthy, resilient and sustainable”, says Michiel Leenaars, director of Strategy at NLnet Foundation and project lead for NGI Zero.“Software Heritage secures the technology commons of today for the long future ahead of us, so how could we not support such a forward-looking endeavour?”

“The European Commission appreciates the forward looking nature of Software Heritage, and we are very happy to contribute to the long term sustainability of the technology ecosystem”, states Oliver Bringer, Head of the Next Generation Internet Unit at the European Commission.