It also has a hacker ethic, based on the idea that writing software and sharing the result on a voluntary basis is a good idea, and that information should be free, but that it's not up to the hacker to make it free by breaking into private computer systems.

Hacker ethic is a term for the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community.

The term hacker ethic is attributed to journalist Steven Levy as described in his 1984 book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

While some tenets of hacker ethic were described in other texts like Computer Lib / Dream Machines ( 1974 ) by Theodor Nelson, Levy appears to have been the first to document both the philosophy and the founders of the philosophy.

However, Levy's hacker ethic also has often been quoted out of context and misunderstood to refer to hacking as in breaking into computers, and so many sources incorrectly imply that it is describing the ideals of white-hat hackers.

The hacker ethic was described as a " new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream ".

However, the elements of the hacker ethic were not openly debated and discussed, rather they were accepted and silently agreed upon.

The free software movement was born in the early 80s from followers of the hacker ethic.

As Levy summarized in the preface of Hackers, the general tenets or principles of hacker ethic include:

; Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position: Inherent in the hacker ethic is a meritocratic system where superficiality is disregarded in esteem of skill.

In an example of the hacker ethic of equal opportunity, L. Peter Deutsch, a twelve-year-old hacker, was accepted in the TX-0 community, though he was not recognized by non-hacker graduate students.

They believed that everyone in society could benefit from experiencing such power and that if everyone could interact with computers in the way that hackers did, then the hacker ethic might spread through society and computers would improve the world.

Many of the principles and tenets of hacker ethic contribute to a common goal: the Hands-On Imperative.

Levy identifies several " true hackers " who significantly influenced the hacker ethic.

All three generations of hackers, according to Levy, embodied the principles of the hacker ethic.

Levy's " third generation " practitioners of hacker ethic include:

In 2001, Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen promoted the hacker ethic in opposition to the Protestant work ethic.

In Himanen's opinion, the hacker ethic is more closely related to the virtue ethics found in the writings of Plato and of Aristotle.

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

* Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University, studies hacker cultures and has written extensively on the hacker ethic and culture

Later it was discovered by an enterprising hacker that the required code was actually in the Applesoft ROM ( though it was never executed ) and could be called there instead: CALL-3288 or ( equivalent ) 62248.

On July 12, 1985, in conjunction with a credit card fraud investigation, the Middlesex County, NJ Sheriff's department raided and seized The Private Sector BBS, which was the official BBS for grey hat hacker quarterly 2600 Magazine at the time.

A similar hacker culture in the USA revolved around the HP-41, which was also noted for a large number of undocumented features and was much more powerful than B3-34.

The free software philosophy at the core of the movement drew on the essence and incidental elements of what was called hacker culture by many computer users in the 1970s, among other sources.

It is noteworthy, however, that the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized.

Fred Shapiro thinks that " the common theory that ' hacker ' originally was a benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later perversion is untrue.

Use of the term hacker meaning computer criminal was also advanced by the title " Stalking the Wily Hacker ", an article by Clifford Stoll in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM.

" “ hacker ” was defined as " one who hacks, or makes them.

The PDP-10 machine AI at MIT, which was running the ITS operating system and which was connected to the Arpanet, provided an early hacker meeting point.

According to Levy's account, sharing was the norm and expected within the non-corporate hacker culture.

In fact, when Bill Gates ' version of BASIC for the Altair was shared among the hacker community, Gates claimed to have lost a considerable sum of money because few users paid for the software.

Linus Benedict Torvalds (; born December 28, 1969 ) is a Finnish American software engineer and hacker, who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel.

Once a talented computer hacker, Case was caught stealing from his employer.

The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) in the 1950s and 1960s.

The name of the institute is a tribute to the term " blinkenlights " originated in hacker humor.

The term hackergotchi originated when the fashion of blog aggregators hit the hacker community, hence the " hacker " part.

TESO was a famous hacker group, which originated in Austria and quickly became international.

* Interview with Steven Levy: About the different hacker subcultures and their relations.

Its founder, Richard Stallman, is referred to by Steven Levy as " the last true hacker ".

In addition to being technically influential ( both in the operating system itself, as well as applications developed on it ), it was one of the projects most important in the original development of the hacker culture ( as documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers ).

* Jamie Harrold as Steven ; a computer hacker that obtains the security codes for the score.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution ( ISBN 0-385-19195-2 ) is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture.

This and other experiences at TMRC, especially the influence of Alan Kotok, who worked at DEC and was the junior partner of the design team for the PDP-6 computer, led Greenblatt to the AI Lab, where he proceeded to become a " hacker's hacker " noted for his programming acumen as described in Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and as acknowledged by Gerald Jay Sussman and Harold Abelson when they said they were fortunate to have been apprentice programmers at the feet of Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt