Roberto Di Cosmo, Inria et Université Paris Cité

Jeudi 21 mai 2026 18 h
Amphi 15, Sorbonne Université - Faculté des Sciences

Towards a new era for Software Science with Software Heritage

Roberto Di Cosmo is Professor of Computer Science at Université Paris Cité, currently on leave at Inria, where he directs Software Heritage, a non-profit international initiative developed in partnership with UNESCO to build the universal archive of software source code. His research spans programming languages and formal methods, including functional programming, type systems, rewriting, and the semantics of programming languages, as well as the analysis of large-scale software ecosystems. A long-standing advocate of Free Software and Open Science, he founded key initiatives structuring the field in Europe, including the Free Software thematic group of Systematic (2007) and IRILL (2010), dedicated to the quality of free and open-source software. He also serves as President of the Board of IMDEA Software Institute and chairs the Software chapter of the French National Committee for Open Science.

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? Do we really know what source code we are using, and where it comes from? 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? With the AI tidal wave, (open source) software has become not only essential to build new LLMs, but also a precious training dataset that plays a key role in the quality of these models. What are the challenges and opportunities that arise? 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 24 billion files from more than 375 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.