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Free Software Foundation Announces 2013 Holiday Giving Guide

Posted by timothy on from the rewarding-good-behavior dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On Cyber Monday, millions of Americans will take to the Internet in search of the newest gadgets to bestow upon their loved ones. Most of these 'gifts' are trojan horses that will spy on their recipients, prevent them from doing what they want with their device, or maybe even block access to their favorite books or music. The Free Software Foundation is proud to introduce a map through this minefield: our 2013 Giving Guide. The Giving Guide features gifts that will not only make your recipients jump for joy; these gifts will also protect their freedom."

2 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. What awful gifts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Think Penguin laptops are garbage. A FSF membership? Any zealot who wants that already has one... A phone running Replicant? Gimme a break.

  2. Re:Propoganda at its best, more RMS lies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Giving the gift of a donation to the FSF? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING? Thats about the most fucking selfish thing you can 'give'. You aren't even fucking giving anything, just tell the person you don't give a fuck about them, you're more concerned with getting your chance to suck RMS off next year. (its a long line)

    That didn't strike me as a great gift idea, but in some affluent households where people have pretty much all the material goods they need, sometimes a charitable donation is made as or in lieu of a gift. Besides, you pretty much expect that plug in a piece like this.

    For those under 35, it's worth repeating what a tremendous service Richard Stallman has done over the course of his career. The GNU project he founded produced commercial quality development toolchain, including C/C++ compiler, linker, debugger, and shell utilities - that enabled Linux and the BSD projects to concentrate on kernel development, probably saving 5-10 years of calendar time (not just man-months). Instead of being like Don Knuth, where they had to put down their main project so they could spend a few years developing the necessary tools, GNU gave them that for free, including the source code and license to modify it as they saw fit.

    And this is in addition to work Stallman has done on emacs and in free software advocacy.

    (And no, I'm not RMS... in fact I use vi!)