Open Source Saves Cows

Okay, not really, but Tina Gasperson is claiming at LinuxPlanet (with her tongue firmly in cheek) that Open Source software saves the lives of cows, since it can be developed at home. You see, you'll buy fewer shoes.

But is open source really greener? Gasperson makes her most serious argument in that open source tends to be developed to require less in hardware resources, while proprietary software frequently isn't. Some Linux distributions, like Knoppix, can be stored and run off a USB key fob. That is pretty cool, but I don't really hear a lot of people rushing to the store for computers without hard drives as a result. So, is it really greener?

One of the big problems I have with "greenness" is that it's such a vague concept, without a lot of concrete metrics. To be "green", a product just has to be more ecologically friendly than something else, but that doesn't have a lot of concrete definition. For software, some metrics should be power consumption, packaging (online downloads don't require any!) and documentation distribution, which open source does traditionally do better with than proprietary software.

And, like Gasperson suggests, open source does require fewer showers.