erik riedel

In recent years, sustainability has become nagging concern in the open source ecosystem. With the recent incorporation of the Green Software Foundation, we are working to build more efficient software that lets you do more while reducing the use of carbon and electricity. The flip side is being concerned with the hardware itself. After all, if you’re building energy efficient software it’s reasonable to believe that hardware should also be a factor. Does it make sense to build efficient green software for an automobile that is mechanically inefficient? Sustainability should happen all the way down - and that is where the circular economy comes in. Through re-use and re-certification of IT components, we can build sustainable platforms that maximizes efficiency while simultaneously lowering our carbon footprint beyond what just software can do. At a time where we are concerned about the limited supply of rare earth metals and aggressive demand for more computational power - this conversation should happen now. So, let’s talk about sustainability all the way down and what that means for the software industry and sustainability programs around the world.