Open source and Blog Action Day

Today more than 15,000 bloggers are participating in Blog Action Day, an initiative that asks bloggers to post on one topic en masse on the same day each year. The 2007 topic is the environment, and open source bloggers are joining in.

Pure Distortion suggests consolidating some of your hardware to reduce your environmental impact.

Running all of my servers on one large piece of hardware is seeing my household have a 10% saving on the amount of electricity that we use and that could be potentially more depending on how mch hardware you are running at home.

For simple things you can do to save the planet, Distributed Information suggests:

…work on or support the use of open source software.

Closed source is based on restricting access to software, which inevitably leads to pointless, non-innovative duplication of efforts. I’m not talking about the duplication of competitive features, or key differentiators that make your business a success either. There are a myriad of tiny internal tools written in every company or project, to just get stuff done, which if shared could improve your bottom line, just by sharing the code amongst all the other companies in the world that do a similar thing.

ComputerWorld UK discusses the idea of a green API with four examples, including:

2. Connecting people to other people and useful services. For example, there’s now a Facebook Carpool app which “makes sharing a ride safer and easier by using Facebook to find people going in the same direction.” Boston-based GoLoco is pursuing the same ends with a stand-alone web service. Both are perfect examples of leveraging the web to connect people towards a greater environmental good.

Finally, here’s a post on OLPC and the environment.

Did you post for Blog Action Day? See a great open source/truth-related Blog Action Day post? Let us know in the comments.

This entry was posted by Ruth Suehle on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under culture, events, One Laptop per Child. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.