hledger/doc/CLIMATE.md

67 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
Raw Normal View History

# Climate impact
> Most human endeavours should maintain and publish an environmental cost/benefit report.
"Cost" means some environmental impact such as resources used (energy, water, land..)
or undesirable waste generated (carbon dioxide, toxins, heat, noise, harm..)
<!-- --<https://ecoaccounting.org> -->
<div class=pagetoc>
<!-- toc -->
</div>
Here is the beginnings of one for the hledger project, with a catchier name.
## Development
Costs related to developing hledger come from:
- developer machine activity
- recompiling, linking, building docs, browsing, running IDEs etc.
- test machine activity
- CI workers recompiling on push, on PR updates etc.
- source code hosting
- VCS operations, file and artifact hosting, rich web UIs, issue tracking, forks, notifications (github etc.)
- public websites and services
- hledger.org doc hosting, updating
- demo.hledger.org hosting
- discussions (matrix, irc, reddit, hacker news..)
- media (youtube..)
- project analysis (libhunt..)
Benefits:
- providing effective accounting tools to people and organisations who would be less effective/less empowered by other tools, potentially unlocking further eco accounting activity and successes
- potentially help advance best practices and community know-how by sharing useful techniques, tools, processes, architecture, patterns
## Delivery
Costs related to packaging and shipping hledger to end-users. Related to development, but broken out separately here. This includes:
- Github artifact building / additional testing beyond standard dev tests
- Hackage hosting/maintenance
- Stackage hosting/maintenance
- Hosting/maintenance in all the other packaging systems and distributions on the Install page
- Download/install/cloning/build work done by user machines
Benefits:
- Roughly speaking, more work done on packaging and delivery means more users able to try out and benefit from the software, magnifying the Development benefits above
## Your hledger usage
Costs from your individual/organisational usage of hledger, other than Delivery costs above, may include:
- Machine usage every time you run hledger
- Hardware upgrade/purchase pressure to satisfy memory/disk space requirements
- Personal and online machine usage and human time while learning, discussing, configuring and maintaining hledger and PTA
Benefits:
- Hopefully, more effective accounting and eco accounting, reducing waste and increasing personal/organisational solvency, success, empowerment and positive impact
## Stats
Some useful statistics to guestimate:
- Yearly cost
- Yearly cost trend
- Cumulative cost
- Predicted lifetime cost
- Comparison with alternate solutions