See also "software archeology" in the sci fi book _A Fire Upon the Deep_. God I love that book.
Did you know Vinge is himself a computer scientist? IIRC, there's a point in A Deepness In The Sky where its implied that the protagonists' interstellar ramscoop ships run a descendant of Unix.
And you know, Git would be the perfect source control system for an interstellar species who various settled systems are separated from each other by light years.