Free Software Foundation Publishes Its 2022 'Ethical Tech Giving Guide'

For the last thirteen years the Free Software Foundation has published its Ethical Tech Giving Guide, notes a recent FSF blog post. "The right to determine what a device you've purchased does or doesn't do is something too valuable to lose."

Or, as they put it in the guide: It's time to reclaim our freedom from the abuse of multinational corporations, who use proprietary software and malicious "antifeatures" to keep us powerless, dependent, and surveilled by the devices that we use. There's no time at which it's more important to turn these unfortunate facts into positive action than the holiday season.

The gifts that we recommend here might not be making headlines, but they're the rare exception to the apparent rule that devices should mistreat their users.
For technical users, the guide recommends pairing the FSF-sponsored Replicant, a fully-free distribution of Android, with the F-Droid app repository, which has hundreds of applications including Syncthing, Tor, Minetest, and Termux.

They also praise the X200 laptop, "one of the few home user devices that's able to run fully free software from top to bottom." With easy-to-repair hardware, it's the laptop most frequently used in the FSF's own office — just one of several freedom-respecting devices from Vikings. And there's shout-outs to MNT's Reform laptop, products from PINE64 and Purism, plus a freedom-respecting VPN, and a mini wifi adapter .

The guide even recommends places to buy DRM-free ebooks, including No Starch Press, Smashwords, Leanpub, Standard Ebooks, Nantucket E-Books, Libreture (which also offers a storage solution). Meanwhile for print books, there's the Gnu Press Shop

And it also recommends sources for DRM-free music (including Bandcamp, Emusic, the Smithsonian Institute's Folkways, the classic punk label Dischord, HDTracks, and Mutopia).

And it also tells you where to find free (as in freedom) films...

The Thinkpad x200 was released in July 2008.

[danda]

It's a great device with good keyboard and trackpoint, all the x series are up to the x230.

But c'mon 2008? It maxes out at 8Gb RAM.

Is there nothing more recent they can recommend? ....as I'm typing this on an x220, and still waiting for a decent replacement...

Re:The Thinkpad x200 was released in July 2008.

[jonwil]

This is probably as new as they can get and be 100% free of any proprietary BIOS bits. (which is necessary to hit FSF RYF certification)

Re:

[Megane]

I especiallz love the German kezboard lazout. And how they try to bill the lack of a trackpad as a feature.

Replicant: What's the point?

[Mononymous]

Replicant supports only a handful of very old Samsung devices, all of which need proprietary firmware to work.
If the FSF is already compromising its values by endorsing blobs, why don't they recommend something up-to-date that will run on a new phone, like LineageOS for microG? [microg.org]

Re:

[codebase7]

More like there's no modern drop in replacement for the CPU that doesn't require the blobs. Yet.

One of the biggest problems today for blobless free as in freedom computers is the fact that all of the major CPU vendors require some sort of blob at some point for "security" (read: DRM) purposes. Regardless of form factor or purpose. OpenRISC may change that, but we are still a few years out.

As for the Replicant endorsement, that's probably due to the fact that no mobile CPU prior to 2008 is viable for use

Re:Replicant: What's the point?

[Voyager529]

They are free-software strict (it's called "Free Software Fundation" for a reason, you know...)
but, the more important, in my point of view, is to avoid Apple products

The problem is that they don't seem to be willing to have some sort of "meet me halfway" list, nor do they seem to be willing to provide some sort of certification, nor do they seem to be willing to commission Free Hardware and make some sort of a production run, nor do they seem to be willing to provide some sort of service to load Replicant on sent-in phones, nor do they seem to have an alternative to iCloud or the Google ecosystem.

GrapheneOS and AOSP CarbonROM might not be "maximum Free", but they're far better than most stock ROMs and give freedom others don't. /e/OS may not be maximum-purity, but it strikes me as being reasonably-close AND allows for a self-hosted cloud server they've released on Github AND it works on hundreds of phones, including some relatively-recent ones (OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro are supported).

I appreciate FSF's principled stance. Really, I do. However, there is not a single, solitary person in my life who would be happy with getting a phone supported by Replicant as a holiday gift. By pushing such a hardline stance, they're pushing irrelevance. It's getting progressively harder to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader or the capability to run an OS as close to RMS-blessed Free as Graphene or /e/OS *at all*, and even the dwindling numbers require ever-higher amounts of hoops to go through...and yet, the FSF isn't willing to offer a 'bronze certification' or 'tepid recommendation' to something that at least allows end users to view and compile?

At the end of the day, I run a more-open-than-not ROM on my phone because I can, but my parents have iPhones because I'm not spending my days giving them tech support. The FSF is so focused on principles that there's no concern for 'end users' anymore. While this list is one part of the solution, the FSF could make it far easier to onramp into the world of Free Software. Without doing so, it comes across as gatekeeping - only those who are willing to get old phones second hand and mod them should be able to run Free Software? I'm sure it wouldn't take much convincing to get OnePlus or f(x)Tec to release a "FSF Edition" phone with as-much-freedom-as-telcos-will-allow, but if software is so Free that it requires hardware that isn't generally available in order to do it, then we start having to figure out a working definition of the term "Freedom" which includes "only using a very specific set of hardware".

Re:

[fbobraga2]

looking for a open-source, nice and modern Android distro: lineageos.org [lineageos.org]

* avoid Google Play, by using f-droid.org [f-droid.org] (I only install banking apps fol Google Play...)

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Most of the stuff on the list is quite old - the X200 is an ancient ThinkPad by now and hard to find used for any price reflecting its age.

You would think they'd have commissioned some replacement hardware already. I mean, they could work with one of dozens of ARM licensees to develop a fully open chip (probably adapting an existing chip design to reduce costs). Or RISC-V is a thing and there are a full silicon vendors for it.

Of course, part of the problem is the "blob free" handling of things - the FSF con

How free is that X200?

[jonwil]

Does it actually require any parts of the original BIOS or have they gotten to the point where you can build and flash Coreboot and have a working system (including hardware like Ethernet) without ever reading a single byte from the original BIOS chip?

There's also non-tech, or a lighter list

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Remember, FSF isn't telling you to buy these things, it's just a guide for *if* you insist on buying tech. You can always get people socks or a jumper.

FSF's guide is also for people who put a lot of value on freedom. And I hope a lot of people do. But if you want to make a small effort, another interesting list is Mozilla's "Privacy Not Included":

https://foundation.mozilla.org... [mozilla.org]

X200

[dgrey387]

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