In order to increase the chances of preserving the Software Heritage archive over the long term, a mirror program was established in 2018, joined by ENEA[8] and FossID[9] as of October 2020.

Development of Software Heritage began at Inria under the direction of computer scientists Roberto Di Cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli in early 2015,[10] and the project was officially announced to the public on June 30, 2016.

[5] In November 2018, a group of forty international experts met at the invitation of Inria and UNESCO,[14] which led to the publication in February 2019 of Paris Call: Software Source Code as Heritage for Sustainable Development.

[6] Software Heritage is a non-profit organization, funded largely from donations from supporting sponsors, that include private companies, public bodies and academic institutions.

A grant from NLNet[18] funded the work of Octobus[19] and Tweag[20] that led to rescuing 250.000 Mercurial repositories phased out from Bitbucket.