In prior years the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an Ethical Tech Giving Guide for holiday shopping where they recommend products like old AMD Opteron motherboards and USB to parallel printer cables that “respect your freedoms” and meet their strict free software definitions. Out today is their newest annual FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide.
This Ethical Tech Giving Guide from the Free Software Foundation is now in its 15th year and some of the recommended products for their 2024 edition are around that old too… While it’s nice recommending DRM-free books / music / videos, making readers aware of the fully-free Replicant distribution of Android, or enjoying Blender Open Movies content as part of their free software purist recommendations, the hardware recommendations continue to be less than practical except for those devoted 100% free software believers.
One of the recommended products they recommend and are “excited” about in 2024 is the Technoethical N150 Mini Wi-Fi USB Adapter for GNU/Linux. This 802.11n mini WiFi USB adapter retails for €50. It’s recommended because it uses the Atheros AR9271 chipset and can be used with exclusively free software.
But being excited about an 802.11n USB WiFi adapter in 2024 — and one costing ~$52+ USD — is hardly exciting in my book. There are many more modern WiFi adapters out there that can run on open-source drivers albeit the lack of open-source firmware is the greater problem with the newer hardware, but at the end of the day I have to juggle and prefer performance, modern security features, value, etc, over the ideas of free software firmware. Or if really wanting to abide by FSF standards, there are other Atheros AR9271 adapters out there for as little as $9~12 USD that also include a much larger antenna, etc.
The 2024 FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide also recommends a 802.11n + 100M Ethernet mini VPN router that starts out at $55 USD. Or some of the other items include a €40 Bluetooth 4.0 adapter or this $24 USB microphone that the FSF originally endorsed back in 2019:
Those wanting to check out the 2024 FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide can find it in full at FSF.org.
