If you only read the headline, the phrase "sustain open source" can be misread as "sustaining open source communities". This this is talking about environmental sustainability. A key quote from the article:
"It [OSS for Climate] will explore the systematic changes Open Source can provide for climate action, addressing issues of transparency and trust, and emphasizing the critical role open source plays in our efforts to combat climate change."
This is intentional, as the podcast is a collaboration between two communities: OpenSustain.tech with a focus on how to sustain the environment with open source and SustainOSS with a focus on how to sustain open source as a movement.
For those like me confused how opensource.net is related to opensource.org from their about link:
> OpenSource.net launched in response to the halt of Opensource.com operations by supervising entity Red Hat, which supports the move. This includes facilitating the republishing of selected, previously published material from Opensource.com for the archives of OpenSource.net with the project’s community manager Seth Kenlon continuing to play an advisory and supporting role.
I'm sure you've comprehended this, but it's not obvious from your snippet: .org (Initiative) launched .net to continue the work of .com, which had been Red Hat's pet project since its inception.
And if I may add a bit of an "insider" insight, Red Hat used to fund it decently. I volunteered for a while, got plenty of swag and they even offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to Raleigh (Red Hat's HQ) for some sort of a community meetup. As a college student from a not particularly developed country, being treated that way by a company as large as Red Hat felt very motivating. Unfortunately in my particular case, US embassy said no.
The chain of argument is longish, but nevertheless it feels well connected. Its an important new conversation, maybe critically important.
The past of the open source movement does not limit the role it will play in the future. What started as a personal computing freedom project is growing into the reference platform for keeping track of the state of the world.
The transparency and trust afforded can simplify a lot of frictions plaguing a world competing over scarce resources where actors will try to hide their negative impacts etc.
In essence the mode of distributing and operating code substitutes for armies of auditors, controllers and accountants etc.
There are blockchainy echoes here, which points to a real challenge: this new conversation is still at a nascent stage. There arent yet systems in advanced stages that exemplify what this new future for open source looks like, but it doesnt take too long to find promising areas, look e.g into the energy related initiatives.
No, all text and images are 100% man-made. It's always astonishing how many people don't understand the crucial role of (open source) software and climate change. Just look at the massive greenwashing that has taken place in recent years with manipulated CO2 offsetting figures. If we want to trust numbers about the impact on our environment and their part of our prices, there is no way around making these numbers traceable using open source / open science methods. And LLMs are not traceable.
Sure it does... Right up until the parent comment gets downvoted to oblivion, taking all subsequent responses out with it, leaving nothing potentially educational behind for anyone to learn from.
(Not a problem unique to HN by a longshot, but actually a shortcoming of nearly every discussion forum I've seen that allows downvoting.)
Yeah it can. But it can also help me publish my latest gas guzzling engine generator schematics to power my farm of the latest ASIC miner running open source firmware. And thats fine since computer code shouldn't give a shit about such things.
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
> Your software must be equally usable in an abortion clinic, or by an anti-abortion organization. These political arguments belong on the floor of Congress, not in software licenses. Some people find this lack of discrimination extremely offensive!
That means open source is a tool that can be used on a gas guzzling petrol engine or the latest ASIC miner specs just as a self sustained farm software and schematics.
Uh. I rephrased the post but forgot to delete the original line and now it's not editable if anyone is wondering about the last sentence. Now its too late.
We can save literal tons of waste if we stop re-implementing the wheel because the C-suite thinks everything from login pages to monitoring is their special sauce.
Entire careers are wasted coding that stuff instead of writing and maintaining it as FOSS. The ecological load of the entire lives of people doing pointless work is truly waste.
That is certainly true of most consumer devices i.e. phones and laptops. For example Dell estimate that 85% of the lifetime emissions for their XPS systems come from manufacture [1] and Apple claim 79% for an 14 inch macbook.
For beefy desktops or servers using hundreds of watts on a continuous basis the situation is rather different e.g [3] which is a Dell estimate for a Precision 7000 series tower showing 74% of emissions attributed to use.
This makes sense: if we assume 700kg of carbon emissions to construct a server, but 300W of continuous power draw during use (seems fairly conservative, especially including cooling) then with the US grid intensity of 0.39 kg CO2e/kWh we find that the manufacturing emissions match the usage emissions over ~250 days of use.
Of course the actual numbers depend heavily on precise circumstances; a data center in an area with less carbon intensive electricity will have a correspondingly lower carbon footprint.
So _as a consumer_ it's true that the biggest contribution is not directly in the usage of the (local) device, but in creating that device in the first place: you're almost always better off keeping a device for longer rather than replacing it with a more power efficient one. But on the server side that isn't the case: the emissions due to operating the data center are also substantial. Plus increased demand on the server side also increases the number of servers manufactured and deployed.
Historically improved hardware power efficiency has meant that carbon emissions have increased slower than compute. So I'm somewhat skeptical when I see articles claiming huge factor increases in the overall carbon intensity of the internet in the near term. _However_ that's not a law of nature, and new technologies that cause a step change in demand for server-side compute could indeed dramatically increase the carbon emissions of the internet.
What’s the forest meant to be? I don’t begrudge anyone their hobbies, I just find it pretty tedious when people play word games to get people interested in their thing. Sustaining the planet has nothing to do with the original mission of SustainOSS.
look, politics is stupid. but sales people understand it and play the game. Microsoft et all are eating all your tax dollars because they play in that bullshit and deliver nada.
if a few people want to take on the hobby of selling open source under the governance, dei, green, whatever flag... it's their hobby as you put it, that you're criticizing. and they might actually (even if 0.00001%) deliver. vs zero percent for Microsoft et al, who still sell under that flags, mind you.
so that hobby might do more concrete good to your tax dollars (more likely euros) than your latest lego star war set or collection of groot figurines or whatever is your apolitical hobby.
"It [OSS for Climate] will explore the systematic changes Open Source can provide for climate action, addressing issues of transparency and trust, and emphasizing the critical role open source plays in our efforts to combat climate change."