Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished on the Friday, August 26th, 2016 meeting.

This week's meeting got off to a great start as there had been many updates during the week that needed reviewing. Many packages had updates and other new ones were added, including Unknown Horizons and GNU Fontopia. adfeno added documentation for their script to the wiki, so now volunteers can have a bit of an easier time checking the packages. The channel also discussed a licensing issue with a game remake and some potentially non-free data, and adfeno set out to file an issue with the project. The meeting also saw the return of jgay, who initiated and previously ran the weekly meetings. He reviewed a bunch of updates in record time, so it was great having his experience and knowledge back at the meeting. GuiltyDolphin updated Shutter, but found some issues with the available categories and user interface with the directory. So the channel decided that next week's meeting will have a theme of looking to improve the categories and other user interface aspects of the directory. juri_ joined in the meeting and announced that they had succeeded in upgrading the license on their project to the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 by contacting each previous contributor, a truly impressive task. The channel caught a small issue with the package in that the license document hadn't been updated yet! We'll be helping juri_ get their project listed in the directory next week, along with many other packages. If you would like to join in on the fun, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

Join the FSF and friends Friday, August 26th, from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

Participate in supporting the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly FSD Meetings pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

Software Heritage is a recently announced non-profit initiative to archive, organize, and share all publicly available software source code. Stefano Zacchiroli is a co-founder and current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He is a Board Director of the Open Source Initiative, member of FSF's High Priority Projects committee, and former 3-times Debian Project Leader.

Can you tell us a little about Software Heritage and what inspired you to create it?

Software Heritage's ambition is to be the memory of humanity when it comes to (Free) software. Our goal is to collect, preserve in the very long term, organize, and share all software that is publicly available in source code form. The vast majority of the corpus we target is the result of decades of work by the free software community. The rest of it will eventually (after copyright expiration) become free software too.

As for our inspiration to start the project, we were discussing seemingly unrelated topics: the cultural value of free software and the risk of losing some of it, the closed nature of state-of-the-art databases used in the IT industry to track the provenance of free software code, and the sad state of scientific reproducibility when software is used as part of scientific experiments. Software Heritage is the result of realizing that a comprehensive, curated archive of free software source code can help on all those fronts.

Can you tell us a little about the free software that powers software heritage?

The Software Heritage software stack is entirely free software. We use Debian GNU/Linux (main) on all our machines, be them bare metal servers or virtual machines. On top of them run our software foundations: PostgreSQL (knowledge base), Wordpress (main website), Phabricator (development forge), and Puppet (configuration management). Our business logic---source code crawling, ingestion, indexing, publishing on the Web, etc.---is implemented in Python 3 using several free software libraries and framework; some of those are: Psycopg2, Dulwich, Subvertpy, Celery, and Flask. All the code we develop ourselves is released under copyleft licenses (GNU AGPLv3 for public facing services, GNU GPLv3 for back-end code), with the exception of code meant to be reused in context where lax, permissively licenses are dominant (e.g., our Puppet modules, that we release under the Apache 2.0 license).

What features do you find unique about software heritage and what sets it apart from similar projects?

The field of digital preservation is luckily vast and full of initiatives that are all trying to prevent the risk of an upcoming digital dark age. The Internet Archive and the Archive Team are known to many free software hackers, but there are dozens of invaluable digital preservation projects out there. The peculiarity of Software Heritage is that we focus on source code, and that we aim at being exhaustive in that "little" niche. We love working with others though, and we are already doing so to make sure that the source code we archive can be cross-referenced with other important artifacts of software development (e.g., home pages, documentation, mailing lists, binaries, etc.) that others are already doing a great job at archiving.

As for our "style", we pride ourselves on our commitments to being a charitable initiative, to run the project openly and collaboratively, and to release all our own software as free software.

Why did you choose the GNU AGPLv3 and the GNU GPLv3 licenses for your software?

Copyleft licenses are the most natural choice for all sorts of critical software. They guarantee via legal means that not only the current version of some software is free, but also that all future adaptations of it will remain so.

Preserving the source code memory of humanity is a critical endeavor. It should be done transparently, as that allows everyone to review how the archival is being done, what safety measures are being put in place, etc. Additionally, the archived source code should be mirrored massively, as each additional independent copy reduces the chances of losing something. To that end archival software will be reused by diverse stakeholders and sometimes it will need to be adapted to fit new scenarios.

Releasing our software under copyleft licenses is first of all a contribution to operational transparency on what we are doing. Second, it creates a level playing field for everyone who will want to reuse our software, for archival or as yet unseen purposes.

How can individuals and organizations contribute?

I'm glad you asked! We're a very dedicated but also very small team, and we welcome help from all interested parties.

• Developers can participate as they usually do in free software projects: join our development mailing list or IRC channel, and dive into our code to submit bug reports or patches.

• Users can contribute by curating content on our wiki, that most notably hosts a suggestion box of endangered source code that we should archive. Raising awareness of the project by promoting it with peers and on social media is very welcome too.

• Organizations can help by becoming testimonials for what we do and by joining our sponsorship program to support our work.

What's the next big thing for Software Heritage?

Up to now we've focused on creating a solid initial corpus for the Software Heritage archive. We're quite pleased with the result: the archive already contains more than 2.8 billion unique source code files, 600 million commits, and covers more than 22 million projects. And it is growing steadily as we keep up with changes pushed to tracked version control systems (e.g., GitHub repositories).

The next big thing is content retrieval. Users can already check if we have archived source code they care about, but they cannot yet browse or download it. This is our top priority. Delivering on it requires engineering work, computing resources (e.g., bandwidth), and administrative scaffolding (e.g., processes to deal with takedown notices). In parallel with this we keep on expanding the coverage of the archive and growing a distributed network of mirrors to avoid single points of failure of any kind. It's a lot of work, but it's necessary and also a lot of fun!

Enjoy this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series, featuring Brett Smith of dtrx.

We wrote previously about why you should support the Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices project. It's built around devices with interchangeable parts, based on unencumbered hardware standards, and with a dedication to protecting and promoting user freedom. The project's decision to raise funds via Crowd Supply means that you can support their work with anonymous payments, and without the use of proprietary JavaScript.

As we wrote previously:

The Libre Tea Computer Card is built with an Allwinner A20 dual core processor configured to use the main CPU for graphics; it has 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of NAND Flash; and it will come pre-installed with Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, an FSF-endorsed fully-free operating system.

It's a device with a lot of potential, and purchasing one will help support the development of even more hardware that respects users' freedom. While we will have to make a final evaluation before granting Respects Your Freedom certification, we have high hopes given the history of the developers involved and the details currently available.

When we last wrote about the project, there was an outpouring of support, helping it get significantly closer to its funding goal (at the time of this writing, 85% there). But with just days left, we need to make one final push. Can you be the one to put the project over the top by backing the Libre Tea Computer Card? The final deadline is Friday, August 26th, so now is the time to act if you want to help promote the creation of devices whose software is fully under your control.

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished on the Friday, August 19th, 2016 meeting.

This week we had a guest leader, Yoni Rabkin (yrk), a long time volunteer on the FSF Compliance Lab Team. yrk did a great job leading the directory team and we thank them for their efforts.

The meeting started off with lots of new faces jumping in to help out. Guest37375 worked on updating the entry for WordNet, and mimi89999 updated the page for Alsaplayer. The channel worked together to add an initial entry for Kaku, and some candidates for deletion were also found. mattlav1 found a package that seemed to be out of commission, and yrk contacted the maintainers about getting an update. mew007 helped update the listing for Crossword Builder, and the channel spent some time tracking down licenses for several packages.

yrk did a great job leading the group and getting so many people involved. If you would like to join in on the fun, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).