Open source technology plays "a very critical role" in addressing climate change, but the community still has some bridges to build between itself and climate science experts, according to SUSE's CTO Thomas Giacomo.

Modern distributed environments require eco-conscious enterprises to collect data from all operations, including the edge, and that can be a daunting task for legacy enterprises with hoards of siloed data.

To accurately measure, report and eventually reduce carbon emissions or other areas of environmental impact, organizations "need to be able to generate data and compute data ... at the edge and very far edge, including satellites," Giacomo told SDxCentral. Fortunately, "open source is actually great at doing that because you can run a lot of those types of sensors with open source technologies."

Linux, for example, can be run on Raspberry Pi devices and managed remotely, which provides air-gapped network connectivity between sensors at the edge and the organization's central location.

Giacomo also shared that a weather forecast institute in Austria is using Linux and high-performance computing (HPC) to model predictions "not for tomorrow or the next week, but predictions for the next years to come based on trends, what happened in the past and the data they're collecting today," he said.

That combination of open source technologies and Linux helps enterprises make significantly more progress than they'd find by using closed source technologies, Giacomo argued. "Without the technology, the [closed source] software is very tightly linked to the hardware. And they both have a lifecycle. Open source is actually able to extend that a lot, and that contributes significantly to reducing waste," he pointed out.

Open source technologies can also be used to help enterprises optimize resource use, like data storage or energy needed to power compute infrastructure and run applications. "That's something that open source has been extremely good at," Giacomo said.

"And we need to continue to do that," he added. "As much as we are pretty good at monitoring the costs [of IT infrastructure], we need to be even better at monitoring the usage and the resource cost as well," since those metrics eventually translate into energy use and carbon emissions.

Although open source boasts several climate-friendly attributes, "that's [just] the beginning," Giacomo said. For example, "we can do a lot of recycling, but if at the starting point we stopped by not wasting, it [would] be a lot easier – and we can still recycle later," he said.

From the CTO's perspective, the most pressing challenge facing open source's pursuit of sustainability innovation is connecting the community with climate change experts. "The open source community is made of engineers, ... and we are lacking maybe the expertise from scientists," Giacomo said.

"The value would be to bring those worlds together more closely because there's a lot of good within the open source community, but maybe we don't have enough expertise on [climate science]. And the other side – the climate change experts – they know what they're talking about, but they don't know how to drive open source innovation to make something out of it," he said. "We should try to create bridges between those worlds."

Another challenge facing a more in-depth move toward climate change mitigation, even though Giacomo believes "the open source community will continue to work on that," is that business decision-makers could decide to not push "in the same direction," he said. In that case, "it will be a challenge to keep evolving and providing solutions."

How might those rifts be avoided? Giacomo explained sustainability teams should educate executive leadership on the benefits of operating with the climate in mind. "When [leaders] transform their business to be more digital, more clouds, that makes sense for them from an innovation standpoint [and] from a business standpoint, but also the sustainability standpoint," he noted.

While the education aspect is true for society as a whole, it's also true for business leaders, "especially the old ones," Giacomo said. "It needs to be part of the checklist for when I need to transform and increase my business. I need to do that, and I need to look at efficiency as well."