hledger/doc/CLIMATE.md

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..)

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