Preserving Inria's Legacy Software: A Crowd-Sourced Approach
Mathilde Fichen
The present article discusses the efforts initiated by Software Heritage and the Inria Alumni Network to carry out a large-scale identification and preservation effort of the historical software artifacts created by Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. In an attempt to scale up a work-intensive process, the authors have turned to a crowd-sourced approach, with the first step consisting of better identifying Inria's software heritage. 
More specifically, the article discusses the outcomes of a survey sent to current and past Inria employees. Its aim was to identify landmark legacy software products of the institute, available source codes, and possible contributors to a future collective archiving effort. 
Unsurprisingly, the survey found that older software pieces are less likely to be identified, with only a small subset of early-age Inria software production being reported in the survey. The availability of associated source codes also varies, with older software being more likely to have partially or completely lost source code, or to be stored on obsolescent media. Source code from recent software however is more likely to be available on modern collaborative platforms like Github or Gitlab, ensuring safe archiving via the Software Heritage universal archive.
In conclusion, the Inria survey confirms the urgent need to identify and preserve historical software items, especially those from the earlier decades which are at higher risk to be definitively lost if no preservation effort is made. We believe that, due to the broad scale and breadth of this effort, the lessons learned will be of interest to other institutions and software preservation initiatives.
As a next step, we plan to set up a dedicated framework to empower Inria alumni to contribute to the preservation of the legacy codes, and we call on other institutions to join in this effort, paving the way for many other crowd-sourcing source code preservation initiatives.
governance, resourcing, and management for dp scaling up