Related papers: The Software Heritage Open Science Ecosystem
Software Heritage is the largest existing public archive of software source code and accompanying development history. It spans more than five billion unique source code files and one billion unique commits , coming from more than 80…
Software, and software source code in particular, is widely used in modern research. It must be properly archived, referenced, described and cited in order to build a stable and long lasting corpus of scientic knowledge. In this article we…
Software source code is an essential research output, and many research communities strongly encourage making the source code of the artefact available by archiving it in publicly-accessible long-term archives.Software Heritage is a non…
We introduce the Software Heritage filesystem (SwhFS), a user-space filesystem that integrates large-scale open source software archival with development workflows. SwhFS provides a POSIX filesystem view of Software Heritage, the largest…
Context: When software is released publicly, it is common to include with it either the full text of the license or licenses under which it is published, or a detailed reference to them. Therefore public licenses, including FOSS (free, open…
We study the evolution of the largest known corpus of publicly available source code, i.e., the Software Heritage archive (4B unique source code files, 1B commits capturing their development histories across 50M software projects). On such…
We introduce a large-scale dataset of the complete texts of free/open source software (FOSS) license variants. To assemble it we have collected from the Software Heritage archive-the largest publicly available archive of FOSS source code…
The number of open source software projects has been growing exponentially. The major online software repository host, GitHub, has accumulated tens of millions of publicly available Git version-controlled repositories. Although the research…
In many academic disciplines, software is created during the research process or for a research purpose. The crucial role of software for research is increasingly acknowledged. The application of software engineering to research software…
Research software is an integral part of most research today and it is widely accepted that research software artifacts should be accessible and reproducible. However, the sustainable archival of research software artifacts is an ongoing…
One in five arXiv articles published in 2021 contained a URI to a Git Hosting Platform (GHP), which demonstrates the growing prevalence of GHP URIs in scholarly publications. However, GHP URIs are vulnerable to the same reference rot that…
Research software is crucial in the research process and the growth of Open Science underscores the importance of accessing research artifacts, like data and code, raising traceability challenges among outputs. While it is a clear principle…
Software libraries are the elementary building blocks of open source software ecosystems, extending the capabilities of programming languages beyond their standard libraries. Although ecosystem health is often quantified using data on…
Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…
So far, the relationship between open science and software engineering expertise has largely focused on the open release of software engineering research insights and reproducible artifacts, in the form of open-access papers, open data, and…
The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers…
Science advances not only through the accumulation of facts but also through the evolution of tools. Crucially, tools are rarely used in isolation. They form tool portfolios, combinations shaped by a discipline's workflows and analytical…
Sustainable software ecosystems are difficult to build, and require concerted effort, community norms and collaborations. In science it is especially important to establish communities in which faculty, staff, students and open-source…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
This paper presents results from the MSR 2021 Hackathon. Our team investigates files/projects that contain known security vulnerabilities and how widespread they are throughout repositories in open source software. These security…