Coalition Including Microsoft, Linux Foundation, GitHub Urge Green Software Development
That includes mobile network operators, ISPs, data centers, and all the laptops being snapped up during the pandemic. "We envision a future where carbon-free software is standard - where software development, deployment, and use contribute to the global climate solution without every developer having to be an expert," Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub said in a statement. Microsoft president Brad Smith said "the world confronts an urgent carbon problem."
"It will take all of us working together to create innovative solutions to drastically reduce emissions. Microsoft is joining with organizations who are serious about an environmentally sustainable future to drive adoption of green software development to help our customers and partners around the world reduce their carbon footprint."
VentureBeat also points out that Microsoft "recently launched a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies."
But Bloomberg explores the rationale behind the new foundation: Data centers now account for about 1% of global electricity demand, and that's forecast to rise to 3% to 8% in the next decade, the companies said in a statement Tuesday, timed to Microsoft's Build developers conference... While it's tough to determine exactly how much carbon is emitted by individual software programs, groups like the Green Software Foundation examine metrics such as how much electricity is needed, whether microprocessors are being used efficiently, and the carbon emitted in networking. The foundation plans to look at curricula and developing certifications that would give engineers expertise in this space. As with areas like data science and cybersecurity, there will be an opportunity for engineers to specialize in green software development, but everyone who builds software will need at least some background in it, said Jeff Sandquist, a Microsoft vice president for developer relations.
"This will be the responsibility of everybody on the development team, much like when we look at security, or performance or reliability," he said. "Building the application in a sustainable way is going to matter."
Re:If MSFT is serious
It doesn't matter what language they write it in, provided they log in through a VT100.
That's really the easiest way to write green code.
Re:If MSFT is serious
Outlawing Bitcoin will have more of a concrete effect. It's consuming half of one percent of all energy production in the USA today.
Re:Let's identify the real issue
"Making software more efficient" is a fine goal which I'm certainly in favor of, but the "save the planet" angle is pure virtue signaling, and utter nonsense to begin with.
This virtue signalling has worked it's way into university engineering courses. Like most any course the first assignment for one of my computer engineering courses was mostly "busy work" to make sure everyone understood how to submit assignments electronically, get in the habit of a weekly assignment, and so on. The first assignment for this computer architecture course was to read some articles on how much energy is consumed in a typical internet search, how many searches were performed, and how much CO2 this emitted. This was basically telling all the students that if they build inefficient hardware and write inefficient code then WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! Well, that's not exactly what the assignment was about but it's not too far from the truth to say that if we didn't make good future computer and software engineers that global warming would set us all on fire before we drowned in the rising sea.
This virtue signalling bullshit isn't just in the liberal arts any more, they are teaching this to STEM students in the universities.
If we transform our power grid so it's pumping out plenty of green-sourced power, the problem neatly solves itself. The answer here is NOT to use less power, it's to get rid of carbon-spewing power sources altogether. That's fixing the problem at it's source, no pun intended. Then we can use as many CPU cycles as we want, for whatever we want, without having to lay a guilt trip on someone for using a few extra kilowatts of electricity.
Of course if you propose this you will be accused of justifying changing none of your behaviors and relying on others to fix your mistakes. I don't drive a gasoline burning truck because I want to see Florida disappear under the rising seas. I drive a gasoline burning truck because my job requires that I be on site to keep the lights on and the phones working for those that work from home. Because I'll have to get to work before the snow plows clear the streets. Because until last week I could not buy an electric 4WD truck.
Electric cars won't lower the CO2 levels unless there are "zero carbon" power plants. We can't lower CO2 levels of air travel unless we develop "zero carbon" aviation fuel. Once we do those things then my truck is burning fuel that is as low in carbon as some BEV charged up by solar power, and it doesn't matter what kind of lightbulbs are in my lamps. Changing my lightbulbs and diet means nothing if my electric utility is burning brown coal to run my high efficiency heat pump and microwave my vegan burrito.
Growth in energy demand is inevitable as people lift themselves out of poverty the world over. Moving from a grass hut to an American style home means using more electricity. That's because moving from a hut where you sweat yourself to sleep every night takes less energy than sleeping in a bedroom that has air conditioning.
I'm not going to sweat myself to sleep every summer or doze off to the sound of my own chattering teeth every winter. Nobody should have to do this. If we bring this to the rest of the world then that means more energy. If that's going to happen while we lower energy costs and CO2 emissions then that means hydroelectric dams, onshore windmills, geothermal power, and nuclear fission power plants. We fix the energy sources so people can search the internet without causing sea levels to rise.
"More efficient"
They say "make code more efficient". Meanwhile their home page contains a little over five small paragraphs of text yet is about 4 MB.
Weird. So... the companies that brought us...
massively wasteful operating systems, languages, tools, and architectures are now going to advocate shutting down all those server farms and all that "cloud computing" and advocate a return to assembly language coding and worrying about every bit and byte, so we can all stop using multi-gigaHertz processors and gigbytes of RAM and terrabytes of drive space and return to doing spreadsheets and word processing and cad and games etc on 16bit processors at perhaps 30MHz again? (with those chips all just sipping power because they are modern embedded architecture microcontrollers).
Nah... I'm pretty sure they don't mean it.
They're gonna keep advocating for huge server farms running 24-7 sucking down more power than some cities, just so users can speak voice commands into their shiny portable objects and a huge server somewhere can do all the background processing, and so on. They're still gonna run huge server farms round-the-clock so their crippled bloated operating systems can constantly phone home for bug fixes and updates (and verify all-important licenses, of course). They're still gonna support wasting gazillions of processor cycles around the world with servers passing web pages around in plain-text HTML form (loaded with oodles of adware and spyware javascript, of course)
As is [sadly] so often the case these days, this is just bogus virtue signalling.
These big companies want average uninformed idiots to think they are "good" (in the new modern "woke" eco-morals sense, certainly not any traditional morals sense) so they are making a big announcement. As a general rule of thumb: if you have to signal your virtue to others, then you have no actual genuine virtue.