Hacker ethic

[1] The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, and libertarianism.

According to Kirkpatrick, author of The Hacker Ethic, the "computer plays the role of God, whose requirements took priority over the human ones of sentiment when it came to assessing one's duty to others."

Willingness to work right through the night on a single programming problem are widely cited as features of the early 'hacker' computer culture."

At any time, a fellow hacker might reach into the drawer, pick out the program, and begin adding to it or "bumming" it to make it better.

Bumming referred to the process of making the code more concise so that more can be done in fewer instructions, saving precious memory for further enhancements.

A particular organization of hackers that was concerned with sharing computers with the general public was a group called Community Memory.

According to Brent K. Jesiek in "Democratizing Software: Open Source, the Hacker Ethic, and Beyond," technology is being associated with social views and goals.

Furthermore, he concludes that 'the difference between the hacker’s approach and those of the industrial programmer is one of outlook: between an agoric, integrated and holistic attitude towards the creation of artifacts and a proprietary, fragmented and reductionist one' (Hannemyr, 1999).

As Hannemyr’s analysis reveals, the characteristics of a given piece of software frequently reflect the attitude and outlook of the programmers and organizations from which it emerges."

To a true hacker, if the Hands-On Imperative is restricted, then the ends justify the means to make it unrestricted so that improvements can be made.

For example, when the computers at MIT were protected either by physical locks or login programs, the hackers there systematically worked around them in order to have access to the machines.

This deeply contrasts with the modern, media-encouraged image of hackers who crack secure systems in order to steal information or complete an act of cyber-vandalism.

Eric S. Raymond identifies and explains this conceptual shift in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:[25] Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's egoless programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers.

Himanen explained these ideas in a book, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, with a prologue contributed by Linus Torvalds and an epilogue by Manuel Castells.

In this manifesto, the authors wrote about a hacker ethic centering on passion, hard work, creativity and joy in creating software.

The Sampo, described in the Kalevala saga, was a magical artifact constructed by Ilmarinen, the blacksmith god, that brought good fortune to its holder; nobody knows exactly what it was supposed to be.

Kalevala saga compiler Lönnrot interpreted it to be a "quern" or mill of some sort that made flour, salt, and wealth.