How green is your software?

Abstract

Green IT is a mission to reduce carbon emissions of information technology. Although immediate savings come from hardware, software also plays an important role. Since a software has a life cycle, it creates direct and indirect carbon emissions: it has a carbon footprint. In this paper we present an approach to analyse software carbon footprints. We analyse a typical software life cycle step by step and give estimates of how large carbon footprints each step produces. A software vendor that claims to be green needs to show that his software has a small carbon footprint. From the green software point of view, it matters how to develop and deliver software, and how usable the software is. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg .