All right, thank you everyone for being here.
I'm going to present today on software licensing for a circular economy.
It's maybe a little bit different than the other talks.
I'm going to focus today on desktop and laptop software.
That's what KD excels at.
But the principles I'm going to talk about are relevant for any software dependent hardware.
The slides, there are many links to them.
If you want to scan the QR code, go to our repository and download them.
You're welcome to, I'll try to come back to this at the end of the talk.
Can everyone hear me okay in the back?
Yeah, great.
Okay, we're going to do a little bit of a game at first.
You're going to do a fill in the blank.
So who here can fill in the blank?
You can just yell it out when I get to it.
Free software, free society.
So how do you get from one domain to the other?
And the way you do that is because what's inherent to a free software license,
the user autonomy, and transparency, is how the argument goes from one to the other.
And I'm going to argue today that those same qualities,
the user autonomy and transparency are how you go from free software to three society or three R society.
Who knows what the three R are?
Can you yell it out?
Reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Okay, that's going to be the main thing that I'm going to talk about today.
And I'm going to put it into the context of the linear economy.
So here we have a graph of a produce,
where you have the input production distribution, use, and then dispose phase.
And when we talk about today's how free software can interrupt that linear economy.
Okay, but first, what is the problem?
Right, we're in a climate crisis.
This is not fine.
So if that comic that probably most of you know, or the dog is sitting in a burning room,
if you were to play that out, this is an updated version from the same artist.
Play that out over a little bit more time.
You might get to the point where the dog is yelling,
there's no reason to let it last this long and get this bad.
We are in that situation now.
We have known about the effect that greenhouse gas emissions have on the environment for over 150 years.
We have predicted that this is going to happen, and we are now in that situation.
So this is not fine, and we have to do something about it.
What does it have to do with ICT?
Well, in the ICT sector, we're consuming about 8% to 9% of the total energy.
This is from 2019, so today it's certainly a bit higher.
And the half of it comes from manufacturing alone.
Okay?
So I'm going to focus on that aspect in the talk, in the interface between software and hardware.
The carbon footprint by device is disproportionate to the usage.
You can see here for the orange parts of the barplots that production alone accounts for 75 plus,
in some case, almost 100% of the carbon emissions over that device's lifespan.
Okay?
So one of the first things is reduce, so longer use.
So how can we interrupt the disposal stage by using our hardware for longer?
Well, part of that is having efficient software, so that we can use the hardware for longer.
Right?
This is a comparison from the Umbal Blindersomp, the German Environment Agency,
comparing the energy consumption of two work processors.
Only identified as open source and proprietary.
You can probably guess which software products as are.
And you can see here that to do the exact same thing, one of the software products,
the proprietary one, consume four times the energy.
Okay?
When you multiply that out over millions of billions of devices,
you're talking about a lot of energy consumption.
The integration of anti-features, like ads,
also are consuming energy on your device.
If users don't want it, they have no option to opt out.
If it's proprietary software, if it's free and open source software,
user autonomy and transparency allow us to make changes to make the software better
to be more efficient and to let us use that hardware for longer.
This is an example from KDE, we are now tracking our efficiency,
merge requests to get an idea of what we're doing to make our software more efficient.
All right, the next stage, reuse.
Here are just a couple of examples.
This is from a campaign that you're all welcome to join.
We have a buff this afternoon at three.
The end of 10 campaign, Windows 10, has its end of life on the 14th of October,
this year.
14th of October is also International E-Waste Day.
I'm not kidding.
And it's also KDE's 29th birthday.
And we're trying to organize a global campaign to raise awareness about the role that software plays
in hardware longevity.
This is an example of from our website, mock up of an old computer,
which you can upcycle, which is still good, still usable.
In many cases, in particular with Windows 10, we're talking about maybe five or six years old.
These are not old devices.
They will become E-Waste if the software doesn't get updated or upcycled.
And you can put a free notebook software on it and use that device to the end of the hardware life cycle,
not the software life cycle.
You can repurpose devices, just an example I found on the internet.
This car thing device from Spotify was discontinued.
Luckily, they opened source the firmware so that people could then take it and make new things out of it.
This is now become a desk thing.
And this is possible because the user autonomy and transparency allow then users.
Yeah, software engineers to then take that device, put new software on it and keep it running.
Here's an example from recycling.
I'm going to talk about it in terms of software recycling.
The SAI Linux group is doing some really amazing work, reverse engineering and series chips from Apple.
The work that they're doing is very focused on that specific thing.
They can take what they're doing.
Take the software that already exists.
In this case, we're very proud in KDE that they are interested in our desktop environment.
Integrate and recycle software that already exists into the software that they are developing and give you a complete functioning operating system.
This is possible, again, user autonomy transparency makes that a possibility if this is proprietary software that's impossible.
So to go back to the three stages, reduce your user cycle.
In proprietary software, you have a vendor dependency at each of those stages.
With free and open source software, you can interrupt the linear model at the disposal stage and reduce reuse and recycle.
If you're interested in what we're doing in KDE, you're welcome to get involved.
The KDE initiative is under the KDE umbrella, but we are an inclusive initiative because this issue is not just about KDE.
It's about all of us, really all of us.
So anyone who's working on software sustainability, please get involved.
We would love to have you join us.
Later today at 3 o'clock, we have a buff to coordinate a Windows 10 to Linux up cycling campaign across free software communities worldwide.
It's here in this building at 3242.
You can also pick up some pamphlets.
It's an environmentally friendly software about this issue for end users to be informed about the world software plays in energy consumption and hardware longevity.
So thank you if you have questions, I think we have another couple minutes.
Great.
Thank you.
I was wondering if there's any way to put pressure on vendors.
So one of the issues I was reviewing security for a client behind a group taking out service going and on desktop.
And one of the issues was that they intelligence don't produce any updated microchrype and security vulnerabilities for Sky� CPUs, for instance.
And even though almost identical CPUs are still supported, they drop their whole range.
And they think they can say microchrype is still supported.
So as new security vulnerabilities have found, things like the spectrum and meltdown.
So you can't get any patches.
Again microchrype fixes and third way is also related to it here as well.
But a bit more practical.
So I don't know if we can put pressure, perhaps in a regulatory sense.
I have talked to a couple of lawyers at like breakfast about the idea of.
So I think it should be illegal, for example, the iPhone bootloaders are locked down when they stop supporting the device.
Because that hardware is still good and it's being turned into e-waste.
To see if there's perhaps some sustainability legislation that could be used to leverage and argue that this should be illegal and perhaps there are other cases where.
Yeah, you can make the argument, but I don't know of anything that actually came out of that.
Those are just having some coffee and chatting about these topics.
But if I think we should like as a community push for these kinds of legislation.
Yeah, we're in a crisis and there's no reason that these devices should be thrown away.
Any other questions?
You're welcome to talk with me at some point during the day.
And thank you very much.
Thank you.