Ask HN: Thoughts on a Climate Neutral OSS License?

mindcrime · on Oct 2, 2019

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

geewee · on Oct 2, 2019

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.

shoo · on Oct 2, 2019

> 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

geewee · on Oct 3, 2019

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.

verdverm · on Oct 2, 2019

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 · on Oct 2, 2019

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 right?) and I don't really see where there's a relevant discussion about enforcabillity?

mindcrime · on Oct 2, 2019

I don't see any reason it would be any more or less enforceable than any other license... but it probably would not technically be "open source". But by the same token, there are a lot of "fauxpen source" licenses running around and, for better or worse, people use them.