Combatting Software-Driven Environmental Harm With Free Software
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
OK, if everybody could take a seat. Joseph, the stage is yours. Great.
00:23
Thank you everyone for coming, especially a big thank you to the organizers. This is a great event and I'm really honored to be here. It's my first time at FOSDEM and this is an incredible community, incredible event. I've been wanting to come for years. I'm representing today the KDE Eco Initiative. This is a community project involving several people, some of them are here,
00:42
some who were here earlier in the railway open source dev room in this room earlier today, and some presented earlier today in the online event of the energy dev room. And I'm going to talk today about combating software-driven environmental harm with free software. I'm not going to be as technical as some of the other talks.
01:00
I'm going to focus more on some of the softer sides of free software and how that's good for the environment. There's a lot of links in the slides if you want to download them. You can either go to our GitLab repository or you can scan the QR code. I'll come back to this at the end. To get started, to get an idea of what the problem is.
01:24
So this is some data from a report from the Association for Computing and Machinery. It's the oldest association of its type since 1947. And they estimated how much energy consumption the entire ICT sector, sorry, the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire ICT sector is.
01:43
And in their estimates, they find that it's within 1.8 to 3.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is roughly equivalent to the airline industry, which is estimated at 2.5%. Now this data includes everything from production to transportation to end of life treatment,
02:02
Bitcoin, training, machine learning models, and things like this. They say at the very beginning of the reports, computing can help mitigate climate change, but it must first cease contributing to it. And in their projections, they estimate that by 2050, the ICT sector will contribute about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
02:24
Can I ask, we're going to net zero by 2050, where are they? Yeah, right. So this data is assuming nothing changes from today. And some of the major contributors to this are training machine learning models.
02:43
That has increased 300,000 times between 2012 and 2018 and is currently doubling every few months in terms of energy consumption. That's one of the main contributors. A short lifespan of digital devices is another.
03:01
Digital devices, they estimate to be at, by 2025, 75 billion devices in the world. That's about 10 per person. If that's distributed evenly, of course it's not. And in their report, they claim at one point towards the end, efficiencies must be coupled with slash demand, so conservation, to reduce the ICT sector carbon emissions.
03:23
And those are going to be two of the main points I'm going to talk about today, efficiencies and conservation. This is from another report. This does not include such a vast data set as the ACM report. This is from the SHIFT project.
03:40
It's a project, a nonprofit from France. This is from 2019. And this is looking at usage and production and how that is distributed in terms of energy consumption. This does not include things like Bitcoin. It doesn't include transportation. So there are several things that are not in this data set. But they estimate, and this is just a good idea to think about what I'm going to talk about today.
04:02
They estimate that usage, which is on the left side, including terminals, that's all the end user devices. Networks and data centers contributes about 55% of the energy consumption, whereas production is 45%. And again, this is not including an entire, the full data set.
04:22
For today, I'm going to talk a little bit about all of these things. I'm going to talk about production and sort of broad strokes, not going into any of the individual devices, and focus mostly on the terminals, so the end user devices. But it does have some relevance in terms of network and data center usage.
04:44
So as I said, I'm going to talk about efficiency and conservation. What do I mean by efficiency? I mean same task, achieving the same result, but using fewer hardware demands. This is going to be focused on desktop software. KDE is a desktop software development nonprofit. And conservation, that is reducing waste driven by software.
05:05
And that will become clear in just a second. This is some data looking at the energy consumption of two word processors. This is from a report from the German Environment Agency, in which they compared various software products doing the exact same thing.
05:23
This is called a standard usage scenario. This is usage scenario measurements. So basically they're running the exact same script to generate the same task from the software, and then looking at how much energy it consumes by using an external power meter. And what they find is that word processor one, which they only identify as an open source word processor,
05:44
is consuming four times less the energy compared to word processor two, which they only identify as a proprietary software product. Now you might look at this and say, okay, for one individual user, this is maybe not that significant, but you have to think of it at scale.
06:02
For word processors, every university, every office, every government institution is using word processors. When you multiply this up by millions, possibly billions of users, that really adds up. And I'm going to give an example of how that adds up. This is directly taken from an online course on sustainable software design from Detlof Toms.
06:25
In this example, he imagines a scenario where you just have a one CPU second reduction in your software. And that one CPU second reduction is about the equivalent of 10 watt second savings.
06:41
When you multiply that by 1.5 million users, who are having perhaps in that savings is interacted with 20 times a day, 230 times a year in your working day, that adds up to 19 megawatt hours of savings.
07:00
What does that mean? To make a comparison, if you take a modern electric vehicle and drive it, that would be the energy needed to drive from Paris to Beijing and back six times. This is just from one CPU second reduction.
07:20
If I can convince 500 people to do 10 of those reductions, with those exact same numbers, you end up with 95,000 megawatt hour savings. That's the equivalent to the energy consumption of a 30,000 two person households in one year. This adds up once you start looking at it at scale.
07:46
Going back to those two word processors, this is from that same report comparing word processor, proprietary and open source, looking at the energy consumption over time.
08:01
I'm not going to focus on what's happening before this blue line. I'm just going to look at what happens here. This is the point in that usage scenario script, when the script saves the document and then goes idle. This lower plot is the open source application. What you see is that the document is saved and in fact it goes idle.
08:23
By comparison, looking at the proprietary software product, it continues doing things. What is it doing? I don't know. It's maybe telemetry, phoning home, doing some sort of analytics. Can the user opt out of this? Probably not. This is probably outside of the user control.
08:42
Is it necessary for the functionality of that software? Probably not. I don't know that speculation, but when you look at what's happening over time, you can see a significant difference here. That's it for efficiency. I'm going to come back to some of this in the second half of the talk.
09:01
I'm going to look at conservation now, reducing waste driven by software. This is an infographic, and I'm going to go through it now. This is from a report based on UN data, I believe, which from 2016 there's a reference to a tsunami of e-waste.
09:22
This is actually increasing. The data that they report is that it would be the equivalent to the materials used to build 4,500 Eiffel Towers in one year. That's e-waste. I thought about what if you stacked all those Eiffel Towers up? That would be 17 times higher than Mount Everest.
09:42
This is in one year, and it's increasing. Less than 20% of our e-waste gets recycled. In our landfills, e-waste accounts for about 2% of the waste in it, but it's 70% of the toxic waste in landfills.
10:02
This is really damaging to the environment. What does software have to do with this? That's a hardware issue. Well, software determines how long we can use our hardware. You have problems like abandonware or planned obsolescence, where your device is no longer supported.
10:21
My parents got this on one of their machines, and I convinced them to switch to Linux because of it because the update would have required buying new hardware. You have bloat and feature creep, where your device no longer meets minimum system requirements. The result is that you have new devices produced and shipped, and functioning devices are discarded as e-waste.
10:42
This is data from Apple. I got it from a book called Smart Green World. This is particularly scandalous that functioning devices end up as e-waste when you consider that this is from Apple's own data. 78% of the greenhouse gas emissions comes just in the production.
11:02
This is a completely useless waste and contribution to the climate crisis. I said I'd talk about free software. I'm going to first focus on KDE's vision. My main point here is that what's good for the user
11:21
is good for the environment. KDE has the vision. This is from about five years ago the community came up with what do they want to see long-term for KDE. What they want is a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. Each word is broken down at the website,
11:41
if you go to the link. I'm going to focus on a couple of them. A world, so everyone, in which everyone has control over the digital life. How do they want to do that? They want to hand control over to the user. They want to put you in the driver's seat. The way they do that is by making free and open-source software.
12:01
To enjoy freedom and privacy, without the freedom to make changes and share them, users are entirely reliant on the vendor's benevolence for apparent control. Transparency and user autonomy aren't features. They're inherent to free and open-source software.
12:21
Those same values are what make free and open-source software already more sustainable than non-free software. It's not just me saying this. This is also the German Environment Agency, which released the award criteria for the Blue Angel Eco-Certification for desktop software in 2020. In which they recognize that transparency in energy consumption
12:44
and user autonomy and letting users decide how they use their software actually is more sustainable. There are three main categories to the award criteria. Resource and energy efficiency, potential hardware operating life,
13:01
and user autonomy. Now, in other talks, I go through what I'm calling the three steps to eco-certification, measure, analyze, and certify, measuring by running usage scenarios, measuring energy consumption, analyzing that data using a tool like Oscar, the open-source software consumption analysis in R, and then collecting the data.
13:20
I'm not going to talk about the measurement and analysis today. I'm going to actually focus more on those softer qualities, the user autonomy ones. In a bit more detail, this is what the criteria require. So resource and energy efficiency means that you are transparent about how much energy your software consumes
13:42
when it's used by an average user. What an average user is is not defined. You have to decide what you think your software is used by most users. Most importantly, you have to publish it. You have to make it transparent about what your assumptions are. And then with that, then you measure the energy consumption and publish it.
14:03
The potential hardware operating life, the requirements that it runs in hardware is five years old. Now, this to me is far too low. I mean, most people, and I have an example later, are using free software can use devices up to at least 10 years old. Five years is not very much. That's 2018 at this point.
14:22
And then the user autonomy criteria. And this is where a free and open-source software really has an advantage. Connecting qualities like uninstallability and modularity, that you can only install what you need, not more, not less. Continuity of support, that the software can be supported
14:41
beyond the original developer's intentions. Offline capability and freedom of advertising, that you can use the software without it having to connect to a server or run processes to feed you ads. Documentation of your use of open standards,
15:02
how you can uninstall it and things like this. And transparency. Now, I would say that most people in the free and open-source software community take these for granted. We don't think of these things as being sustainable. And so I'm going to pick just three of them and talk a little bit about them now. And I think then I'll have plenty of time for questions.
15:24
So, uninstallability and modularity, right? This is not exciting news, right? We can uninstall things completely when using free and open-source software. A lot of proprietary software products you can't, right? By leaving things, so by running things that you don't want, right?
15:44
You're creating inefficiencies when using that software. It's going to take longer to load and start. It's going to take longer to shut down. Those software components that you're not using might be adding CPU seconds that add up once you start thinking about it, scaling it up to millions, possibly billions of users.
16:03
Modularity. If there are things that are being installed with a software product that you don't want, right? That's, again, creating inefficiencies. Free software gives users the control to decide what they install or uninstall. And that creates a more efficient software product.
16:21
Continuity of support. So this is actually a picture I asked around in the KDE community, which hardware people are running KDE Plasma on that they know is no longer supported by the vendors. And one person responded. This is from, I don't know if this is the exact model, but a 2009 MacBook that had their end of life in 2019
16:44
with Apple's 10.10 Mac OS. And they are now running it with an up-to-date operating system, Kabuntu with Plasma long-term support without any problems. You can do this because the support for free software
17:02
doesn't have these arbitrary or planned end of life moments. The Blue Angel and their criteria, you don't have to be free and open source software to get the award, but you do have to have a plan for long-term continuous support after you stop as a company developing that software product.
17:23
And if you don't, you have to make it free and open source software to get the ecolabel. Offline capability and freedom from advertising, just to put some numbers to this. So at KDE and like many other free software products,
17:43
there's no forced opt-in telemetry. In fact, KDE does have a telemetry policy, but it's opt-in at all times. Users aren't automatically giving data to KDE. Most other software is not also requiring that.
18:02
What does that mean in terms of energy savings? So this is a graph from a report for the EU, carbon footprint of unwanted data used by smartphones. And what I like is it makes a very clear connection between the network and the data centers in terms of power consumption. So every time your smartphone or computer is going through the network,
18:25
of course, it's consuming energy. They, in this report, say that 60% of EU citizens, when asked, would opt out of advertising if they could on their smartphones. They estimate that that savings, if those 60% of the people could opt out,
18:43
would be, at its worst, three to eight million metric tons of CO2 a year. That would be equal to 370 to 950,000 EU citizens' annual energy consumption, for something that many users probably don't want.
19:05
So yeah, these things add up. By making software that respects users, that gives users choice, we are actually making more sustainable software. There's many more topics to talk about.
19:20
If you're interested in the topic, you guys get a sneak peek to our handbook about measuring the energy consumption of software. It actually will be officially announced next week. But it's online now if you want to go to our website, eco.kde.org, in which we cover sort of three main parts. Why does this matter is the first part.
19:42
What is the Blue Angel? It's focused on the criteria as a benchmark for what a sustainable digital society could look like. And the part three is then how do you measure your energy consumption and how do you fulfill the user autonomy requirements if you're interested in eco-certifying your software.
20:02
KDE has been interested in eco-certifying their software. We are proud to announce that we're the first to have a eco-certified computer program in the global eco-labeling network with Ocular. This is from April last year. There are other initiatives that I just wanted to point out before my time is up that I think are really important.
20:23
This is from the Free Software Foundation Europe. It's an open letter to demand that the right to repair must include software. Software determines how long we can use devices. If we have a right to repair them, we should have the right to put any software we want on those devices.
20:42
You can keep devices in use. Again, this is in the Free Software Foundation Europe initiative. That's really great, upcycling your phone. Just look into it. I just wanted to point it out because I think they're doing great things. If you're interested in, as a software developer, measuring software, we set up a lab in KDAB. This is Arna, who gave a talk earlier today
21:01
in the online energy dev room. Chris has helped out, set it up. Several other people who are involved in the KDE eco-initiative have helped set this up. We have a lab that's going to set up so that you can measure the energy consumption with an external power meter. We're in progress right now of trying to make an online portal so that you can upload
21:22
your usage scenario script, get a report back. You can either use it for data-driven decisions about your own software design or applying for something like the Blue Angel eco-label or similar. And I just want to, as a final note, KDE voted in October to make sustainable software
21:45
one of their goals, one of their three goals for the next couple of years. And in KDE, we're trying to align various initiatives within the community, doing things similar to actually what was talked about earlier, trying to think of ways to give users information similar to that light bulb that Kai was talking about earlier
22:02
that gives you an indication of what's consuming energy, and we're thinking of how we can implement those things into an eco-widget so that users can get information about what maybe the grid intensity, what the power grid mix looks like at that moment so they can decide if they want to do an update when there's more green energy, things like this.
22:22
Various other initiatives, if you're interested, this is a community project. You're welcome to get involved. Various channels to get in touch with us, e-mail, Mastodon. We have a big blue button online meetup every second Wednesday. That's next Wednesday in which we talk about various things
22:40
and then mailing list and matrix room. So thank you. I just have to note that this is a project, so I'm working in the Blauer Angle for Foss project, which is a government-funded project from the German government. And, yeah, so thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.
23:10
So actually, I'm going to do one thing. We have online questions as well. I feel like online folks always get ignored first, so I'm going to just try... Is there any online questions that we could...
23:20
None so far. None so far. Okay, then I'm going to bring it to the room. So I saw your hand first. I can certainly mention it next time at an event and I have someone's ear, which is not often.
23:47
So the question was... Sorry, I have to repeat it. Next time I'm in contact with someone from the German government, if they can open source drivers, they can force hardware vendors to open source drivers. And I would be happy to try to drop that comment if I can.
24:04
I saw a hand over here before. I think it was yours.
24:26
So the question is... So what is the Blue Angel? Where do you find out information about the Blue Angel as a consumer? So the Blue Angel... So I actually can... I'll ask... I think there probably are some German speakers in this room
24:41
or people who are in German-speaking countries. Who here knows the Blue Angel and what do you know it for? And what is it known for? Paper. Most people say paper. So it's really well known for paper products and toilet paper in particular. And I've started some talks making the joke, what does software and toilet paper have in common? They can be certified.
25:05
So Blue Angel certifies a lot more than that. There's hundreds of products, cleaning, detergents, construction materials, things like this. In the IT sector, they certify servers or server providers
25:23
and now software. And that's it. They want to extend this... Just to put this out, they want to extend the ecolabel to not just desktop software but also mobile apps and distributed software systems or client server type things.
25:41
That's in progress right now. The desktop software, how you can find out about it is if you go to the Blue Angel website, there they have a list of all the products. I don't remember the link off the top of my head, but it might be... No. It's on our website. If you're buying a product, then it's on the packaging.
26:01
So that's the kind of thing that... And what it says, so it's maybe just an important point, they're a type one ecolabel, which means that it looks at the entire lifespan of the product and it requires a third-party evaluation of compliance. Whereas other ecolabels, not like type two or type three I think are the others,
26:21
don't require third-party evaluation. So it has a bit more of a stringent process in the evaluation. Is there time for more questions or... We have to switch over. You can take it to the hallway or...
26:40
I'm happy to talk in the hallway or online or after the event. So thank you. Thank you.