Software Heritage 2025 Symposium and Summit

Takeaways from the Software Heritage Symposium 2025

The annual Software Heritage Summit and Symposium provides a unique platform for academia, industry, and policymakers to discuss critical issues at the intersection of software, artificial intelligence, and society.

This year’s Symposium focuses on four key themes:

Cybersecurity and regulation
In the era of heightened regulation, including the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), ensuring a robust and open infrastructure for software preservation and traceability is vital. Stricter global cybersecurity and compliance requirements pose challenges to the software ecosystem but also open pathways for innovation. Software Heritage, in partnership with UNESCO, provides the transparency, reliability, and long-term accessibility required to navigate these regulatory landscapes. This track will explore the intersection of policy, regulation, and technology, highlighting how open infrastructures safeguard public and private digital ecosystems.

Open and transparent AI
AI’s transformative potential must be harnessed responsibly to serve the entire global community, particularly regions in the Global South. Transparency in AI development and deployment is crucial for building trust, ensuring ethical practices, and reducing inequality. Software Heritage, through its preservation of source code and partnership with initiatives like StarCoder2, provides a foundational infrastructure for creating and sharing open AI models. These efforts enable equitable access to AI technologies, supporting innovation in underserved regions and fostering inclusive global progress. Discussions in this track will explore strategies to ensure that transparent, open, and efficient AI models are accessible to everyone, regardless of geographic location or economic status.

Open Science
The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science underscores the importance of non-commercial digital infrastructures for preserving and disseminating scientific knowledge. Software Heritage embodies this vision by ensuring community-driven, long-term stewardship of software source code as first-class research outputs. This session will delve into how Open Science practices, supported by Software Heritage, foster collaboration, accelerate discovery and promote scientific endeavors globally.

Cultural preservation and education
Software source code is a unique form of cultural and documentary heritage, with immense educational value. Recognizing software creators, including contributions from women and minorities, is critical to capturing the full narrative of digital innovation. Building on the 2019 Paris Call and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, this track emphasizes the importance of software preservation for empowering citizens and cultivating digital literacy, ensuring inclusive participation in today’s digital society.