Group:Buying Guide 2012

Each holiday season for the last few years, the FSF has released a buying guide with recommendations of products that respect your freedom. This year, we want to make it easier for people to make shopping decisions with the guide, so we're thinking of using the format of the popular diet books "Eat This, Not That." For the most part, each recommended product ("Buy This") will be paired with one that we don't recommend, but that people are likely to consider buying ("Not That").

We plan for the guide to cover audio, video and ebooks as well as computers, consumer electronics and software. To get all this information together, we need your help. This group is a place for you to provide your ideas for the buying guide. There are three sections, one for pairs of "Buy This" and "Not That" products, and one for each category of product by itself.

Thanks for helping your fellow FSF members make ethical choices this holiday season. Happy holidays!

Guidelines

• Use the existing categories of ideas whenever possible
• For pairs, the items should be relatively interchangeable as far as functionality is concerned.
• If it's not obvious, provide an explanation of why you chose the product(s) for the section you put it/them into.
• Provide links to detailed descriptions of the products when possible.

Ideas

Pairs: Buy This, Not That

• Electronic Design Tools: download gEDA ( http://www.geda-project.org ) or Kicad ( http://www.kicad-pcb.org ), not Eagle ( http://www.cadsoftusa.com )
• 3-D CAD/CAM: download FreeCAD ( http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page ) not CorelCAD ( http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4120067&cid=catalog20038&segid=752 )
• Animation: download Blender ( http://www.blender.org ) not Adobe ( http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html )

Singletons: Buy This

• Donations to the FSF or free software development projects in friend's names
• Gifts from the shop.fsf.org
• DRM-free ebooks
• Recommending a hosting service that respects people's freedom to be in control of their machine
• LulzBot AO-100 3D Printer (3D printer certified by the FSF) and possibly other freedom-respecting 3D printers
• Computers with Trisquel preinstalled from Think Penguin
• Any source for phones and tablets with Replicant preinstalled?
• Devices with free OSs preinstalled from http://swappa.com/
• If you can't find a device with a free OS preinstalled, get one and install the OS yourself, then give it to your friend. This makes an even better present than something you paid for but didn't work on.

Singletons: Not That

• Microsoft Surface
• iPhone
• Kindle

Similar guides and other resources for inspiration

• [h-node](http://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en) is our project for promoting hardware that works well with free software, you might be able to find free correlates there if you have a particular non-free device that you want to tell people not to buy.
• http://blog.makezine.com/2008/02/29/the-open-source-gift-guid/
• http://www.defectivebydesign.org/holiday
• http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Printer_buying_guide

"issue" is not in the list (interest, location, project, school) of allowed values for the "Organized around" property.