Green Software Foundation

Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks launched the Green Software Foundation (GSF) on May 25, 2021, “with the Linux Foundation and the Joint Development Foundation Projects LLC”. Legally it is not a separate non-profit but a series of that LLC, a Linux Foundation affiliate built to host standards work: its charter names it “Joint Development Foundation Projects, LLC, Green Software Foundation Series”. So it sits under the LF the way GraphQL’s specification and FOCUS do, with its own charter, membership agreement and intellectual-property rules, and the copyright on its specifications belongs to that series.

Organisations join as Steering or General members; in 2026 the steering members were Accenture, Google, NTT DATA, Siemens and UBS, and nearly 70 organisations were members in all. A Steering Committee, chaired since 2025 by Gadhu Sundaram of NTT DATA, sets direction and ratifies standards, and each member organisation has one vote in a working group whatever its size. The work happens in working groups: Software Standards and, since 2025, Hardware Standards write specifications, while others run open-source tools, policy research and the community. Asim Hussain led the foundation as chair and then executive director until March 2026; Navveen Balani, who co-chaired the SCI for AI work, became executive director on May 6, 2026.

For someone choosing technology, a GSF badge marks a measurement method or a tool for applying one, not a runtime you deploy. The foundation’s position is to cut emissions at the source rather than offset them, so its specifications deliberately ignore renewable energy certificates and offsets. It has no project maturity levels that apply across its catalogue: specifications move through a seven-step lifecycle from proposal to published, while its open-source tools have been labelled graduated, maintained or retired.