Positioning software source code as digital heritage for sustainable development

The second annual symposium on the theme “Software Source Code as documentary heritage and an enabler for sustainable development” organized by UNESCO and the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) on 7 February 2023, took stock of the initiative’s achievements over the previous few years.

Throughout the conference, five major dimensions of software source code were explored:

1. as documentary heritage and as an enabler for digital skills education.
2. as a first-class research object in the open science ecosystem.
3. as an enabler for innovation and sharing in industry and administration.
4. its perspectives on long term preservation.
5. technological advances allowing massive analysis of software source code.

The symposium also announced the establishment of an informal international working group to promote the need for international recognition of software source code as an enabler for sustainable development. Its mandate on UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MoW) programme, can be summarized as follows:

• Identify landmark software for inscription on the MoW International Register.
• Propose software source code criteria for inclusion in the MoW programme’s General Guidelines.
• Explore the possibility of establishing a permanent organizational structure dedicated to providing support for the identification, preservation, and promotion of software source code as digital documentary heritage for sustainable development.

Inria launched the Software Heritage project in 2016 with the goal of collecting, preserving, and making available the source code of all software ever written, through a dedicated open platform.