
Ask HN: Thoughts on a Climate Neutral OSS License? - geewee
I&#x27;ve seen a growing interest in developers about doing something about climate change. It seems, particularly in the context
of a big company, the engineering department doesn&#x27;t really have much leverage, even if they wanted management to do things differently.
What if we had a &quot;green&quot; open source license? It would mandate that the companies that use the software, offset their pollution, and become
climate neutral?<p>It could suddenly make going carbon neutral a net positive, rather than just a cost.,
We could have conversations like &quot;If we become carbon neutral, for the price of 20.000$ a year, we&#x27;ll have access to software that can save us 100.000$ a year in work we don&#x27;t have to do&quot;<p>So HN: What are your thoughts on a &quot;green&quot; open source license?
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mindcrime
You could do that, but I'm not sure it would actually be Open Source, per the
OSD[1]. It would depend on the details, but I suspect this would trip over
criteria 5 and or 6 of the OSD.

[1]: [https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd-
annotated)

~~~
geewee
That's true - It's definitely not "classic" open source - but I wonder if it
still could have most of the benefits of open source, while still being able
to push an agenda.

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shoo
> what if we had a "green" open source license? It would mandate that the
> companies that use the software, offset their pollution, and become climate
> neutral?

it'd need a bit of work to clearly define what this means.

suppose there's a climate-neutral-licensed plant optimisation tool T. maybe
company A operates a coal mine (or whatever), and could save $1m / year by
using the tool T. But company A currently doesn't offset any of their
pollution, and doing that would cost them $10m, which they would be required
to do by the licensing terms of tool T. So, assuming the license terms were
enforceable, it wouldnt make purely financial sense for company to use T as
the costs of complying with the licensing would exceed the cost reduction of
using the tool.

But, could company A stand up a second tiny company B, which is a 1 person
operation that has a contract to apply tool T to company A's operations, as an
ongoing service? Then the (direct) pollution from company B would be tiny (1
person, 1 office, a network connection and a coffee machine or whatever), so
it might only cost $5k / year to offset. But then company A could receive the
$1m benefit of T without directly using it, without needing to offset $10m
pollution, but perhaps with some additional cost of $50k/year of overhead
required for the additional structure of company B.

i.e. in this example in the sense of the productive physical economy,
essentially the same thing is happening, in terms of overall environmental
impact, but by performing non-productive financial/legal gerrymandering
company A might be able to comply with the license without really doing
anything.

this could be avoided if the calculation used to figure out a company's
environmental impact accounted for the indirect environmental impact of how
company's revenues are obtained and costs are incurred -- perhaps through
relationships with other companies or other parties that are heavily
polluting.

but that'd get complicated! one way to figure this out in an objective way
would be to have the state regulate it and estimate the environmental impact
of each firm. bureaucracy required would be similar to taxation, but
accounting for "how did you make this profit? was it from a productive
environmentally sustainable activity, or a non-productive or non sustainable
activity?"

then, assuming this bureaucracy was already in place to estimate the climate
impact of each organisation, your license could refer to that

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geewee
Yeah this is something I've thought of as well - there's really quite some
potential loopholes, if you really want to get through it, using e.g. shell
companies or the like. It's a tough question to solve, and I don't know any
mechanics in place currently to measure that.

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verdverm
It probably is not open source as we know the definitions and likely
unenforceable. See the discussion around Chef and ICE from a post here last
week

~~~
geewee
It's definitely not free software as we know it. I'm curious what you mean by
unenforcable? I checked out the Chef announcement
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049822)
right?) and I don't really see where there's a relevant discussion about
enforcabillity?

