startssl.com is part of the cartel you don't want to feed... Yes, they offer free certificates, but only in order to market their paid certificates.

FWIW, I use free certs from startssl.com myself.

If you really want to avoid the "cartel", use cacert.org or a self signed cert.

I will use cacert as soon as they're part of the standard cert group on all the major browsers :P