Photo: Tristan Nitot (source: Scaleway)
Scaleway, “digital infrastructure provider”, announces the appointment of Tristan Nitot as Sustainability Lead. “Having worked for a long time to limit the carbon footprint and to ban the reckless use of water in its datacenters, Scaleway notably operates Scaleway’s DC5, the most energy and water efficient datacenter in Europe. Aware of the need to provide rapid and concrete responses to the societal injunction for digital sobriety, Scaleway entrusted Tristan Nitot with the responsibility of leading the strategy aimed at ensuring that all the logistical and technical choices, but also the processes and support for customers in the responsible use of digital services are carried out with consideration of the environmental impact of cloud services.”
17 years at Mozilla
Tristan Nitot is a long-time specialist in free software and the ecological impact of digital technology. He has been involved with Mozilla since its inception and chaired Mozilla Europe. After 17 years in this librist project, he left it at the beginning of 2015.
The same year, he joined a French open source personal data hosting start-up, Cozy Cloud, then in June 2018 became “vice-president advocacy” (responsible for communication) of the French search engine Qwant. He became CEO in September 2019, and left in March 2020.
Scaleway recalls that Tristan Nitot “has been involved in the fight against climate change for several years, in particular via his podcast, “L’Octet Vert”, as well as as an author and speaker. He also sat on the National Digital Council from 2013 to 2016 and has participated in the National Pilot Committee for Digital Ethics since its creation.
In October 2016, he published a book, “Surveillance://” (C&F editions), a recommended work on digital policing. Where he notes that “free software is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for having control and mastery of the computing we use”.
Windows 11, “hallucinating economic mismanagement”
During a round table entitled “Open source, an essential “contributor” to GreenIT” at the Open Source Experience fair, in Paris in November 2021 (transcription there by Libre à lire, thank you April), Tristan Nitot pointed out in particular the question of forced renewal and its environmental impact (see on this this post from my blog neighbor Frédéric Charles, “When will a digitally responsible OS?”):
“Windows 11, for example, is a mind-boggling ecological mismanagement. Why? Because Windows 11 requires state-of-the-art hardware to run. If you are a Microsoft Shop, you are dressed Microsoft from head to toe, you have a problem is that sooner or later you will have to upgrade to Windows 11, so replace all your hardware. While we know how to run on these materials, which ultimately wear very little, open source, for example GNU/Linux, light software which makes it possible to make the material last, so this reduces gas emissions greenhouse gases which were the original problem.”
Scaleway (formerly Online SAS), created in 1999, is a subsidiary of Iliad, Xavier Niel’s group, which owns, among other things, Free. Scaleway says it has 25,000 corporate customers, 7 carbon-neutral data centers (in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw), powered entirely by renewable energy, and 500 employees.
Read also
Can IT be sustainable? – October 17, 2020
Scaleway data center without air conditioning passed heat wave test – September 25, 2020
Free software against surveillance: “necessary but not sufficient” – October 31, 2016
Tristan Nitot, Guardian Angel of the Red Panda – December 22, 2005