Preserving Inria's legacy software - Software Heritage

'In 2002, Grady Booch, renowned computer scientist and software engineer associated with IBM, circulated an email titled “Preserving classic software products” in which he called for identifying software that should be a priority for preservation efforts and locating the source code.

Following in these footsteps, Inria, Software Heritage, and the Inria Alumni Network joined forces to help identify the software heritage of Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. A survey was sent to thousands of past and present Inria employees, inviting them to contribute to identifying Inria legacy software products and possible source code archives. (More from a 2023 blog post.)

The survey asked participants to identify “historical software pieces from Inria that would justify preservation efforts.” [...]'