Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I remember in the late 90s, in the heady days of getting organizations up to speed with technology, I would suggest to organizations that they add in their budget replacing 1/4 to 1/3 of their computers each year (instead of the much more common practice of replacing them all at once every 5 or 10 years when a grant happened.) This was for all the good reasons: computers are cheap, support is expensive, and it would cost more time and money to diagnose and fix a computer than replace it - so replacing computers on a regular schedule would actually decrease IT costs.

Well, all of that is true. But in this newer era, when we think that cost is more than just dollars, but we also have to think about the hidden cost of all of those toxic chemicals, fossil fuels, and water that goes into manufacturing computers, as well as the bulging landfills all over the country.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of free and open source software in environmentally sustainable computing. Some of the biggest reasons to replace computers is not as much the hardware failure issues, but software bloat and cruft, and planned obsolescence. You can’t run Microsoft’s Vista on a computer that is more than a year or so old. Computers that now run Windows 2000 (there are plenty of them in nonprofit offices, I’m sure) probably can’t even run XP, let alone Vista. But computers of that vintage can pretty happily run Ubuntu Feisty (the current Ubuntu version). And older computers running Linux make very handy single (or even multiple) purpose servers - file servers, backup servers, dhcp servers, routers and firewalls, print servers, etc.

The great thing is that converting to Linux won’t just help environmentally - Linux has lower IT costs - lower support costs, and no software acquisition costs. If an office converted from Windows to Linux, they could keep their hardware much longer (five years easily), and have much lower IT costs, thus, in the end, creating a more environmentally and economically sustainable office.

Of course, there are caviats. There are software options that don’t exist yet, there are hardware incompatibilities, but these decrease every year. Sometime in September, NOSI will be releasing the new version of the primer on open source software for nonprofits. I’ll be announcing it, for sure. There will be some much more detailed information that will help make it easier to figure out if it is right for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Hardware, Linux, Nonprofit Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.