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What are the best alternative presents for a geek?

The typical geek has carefully selected and purchased their gadgets of choice, has a computer that’s tuned to perfection and needs no software purchased (because their entire suite is open-source) - so aside from comedy tee shirts with clever slogans that can only be understood by other geeks, buying for geeks is difficult, especially if you’re not a geek, because you can’t even understand if the tee is funny or not.

Novelty Gifts

Giving up and buying a novelty-gift is not a good solution, it has negative connotations. Novelty gifts are often made of plastics and are immediately discarded because they tend to look twee and lame next to the 30inch LCD monitor, so if you didn’t have environmental guilt about naff presents before, you will have in future.

Novelties get made, bought, wrapped, presented and then discarded by January 1st. A whole lot of carbons belched into the atmosphere and gallons of oil used for no reason, and they’re often not recyclable because they’re made in a sweatshop backwater that uses chemicals that are banned by most governments. There, guilt, it must be Christmas.

So don’t do it, don’t go naff.

The geek in your life has bigger fish to fry and your gift can help.

Good Gifts

Donating to a geek charity will show that you care, and that, even though you can’t comprehend the strange words they use, you do at least appreciate that what they do is changing the world.

Several worthwhile charitable causes with a technological skew immediately spring to mind…

1. The Wikimedia Foundation - the people who run Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (etc!) as a global services (free to use and free of advertising). The Wikimedia foundation have rejected lucrative corporate partnerships in order to preserve their independence and need the financial help of the community to continue to grow.
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation - who protect the the individual when large firms threaten to trample their rights with with legal bravado, and protect everyone by challenging companies and governments that enforce new laws that restrict rights previously granted to the individual.
3. The Free Software Foundation have a worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users. If you’ve not heard of the FSF, you might have heard of GNU/Linux, which is part of the free software stable.

I’m sure the geek in your life would appreciate a personalized donation far more than a novelty mouse warmer. If you can think of worthy causes to add to the list (or if you represent a worthy cause that’s not mentioned and happen to have dropped by), respond below.