Reference Implementations

A community-driven, educational collection maintained by the Green Software Foundation, holding working examples of how GSF specifications and green-software tools can be applied in practice.

Each entry is one possible way to apply something — not a recommended toolchain or a production-grade system. The implementations are educational starting points, intended to be read, run, and adapted to each team's own context.

What is a reference implementation?

A reference implementation in this repository:

• Demonstrates one concrete way to apply a GSF specification or to encode a green-software practice into a working tool. Alternative implementations of the same thing, taking different valid approaches, are explicitly welcome.
• Is runnable — anyone can clone, install, and explore the example locally.
• Includes sample data or recorded fixtures where applicable, so the example can be tried without paid API access or proprietary infrastructure.
• Is open source under an OSI-approved license (MIT preferred for consistency across GSF code repositories).
• Documents its scope, choices, and assumptions so readers can evaluate them against their own context.

A reference implementation is an educational, illustrative example. Different workloads and teams will reasonably make different choices about tools, measurement providers, and approach. Each implementation documents the choices it made so readers can evaluate them against their own context.

Repository structure

The repository is organised into two top-level categories:

reference-implementations/
├── specifications/                    Implementations of GSF specifications
│   └── <specification>/
│       ├── gsf/                       Maintained by the Green Software Foundation
│       └── community/                 Contributed and maintained by the community
│
└── tools/                             Developer tools, agent skills, linters, workflows
    ├── gsf/                           Maintained by the Green Software Foundation
    └── community/                     Contributed and maintained by the community

specifications/ holds runnable implementations of GSF specifications (such as SCI, SCI for AI, and others as they mature) applied to specific workload classes.

tools/ holds developer-facing tools that encode green-software practices — agent skills, code-review assistants, linters, GitHub Actions, dashboards, and similar working examples that help teams build greener software day to day.

Within each category, the gsf/ subdirectory holds implementations maintained by the Green Software Foundation, and community/ holds contributions maintained by the broader community. The folder a project lives in reflects who stewards it, not who originally built it.

Available reference implementations

Project	Implements	Category	Maintainer
sci-for-ai / llm-inference	SCI for AI applied to LLM inference	Specifications	GSF

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution process, including how to propose a new reference implementation, the conventions each project should follow, and the difference between GSF-maintained and community-maintained entries.

License

The reference implementations in this repository are individually licensed; see each project's LICENSE file. Documentation and the top-level repository contents are licensed under the MIT License.

Governance

This repository is maintained by the Green Software Foundation. For questions about scope, governance, or working-group involvement, please reach out via the GSF community channels or open an issue.