Classification also seems to assume that hackers care at all about the ethics of what they do, which does not seem to be the case much of the time. It seems to me more like their ethics merely reduce to the context of what interests them or what environment they are in, as much as they may profess differently. Perhaps this is not much unlike any other intellectual movement. For example, those who were interested in an accurate study of astronomy once had to exhibit criminal behavior to achieve it. Now they seem like the nice if boring guy next door: all context, no ethics.

The hacker philosophy is a good summary but is perhaps intentionally vague, and also tries to hijack the term for directly supporting the FSF philosophy. For example, tenants 3 and 4 can either be selfish, humanist, or somewhere between. Tenant 2 has always struck me as confusing being on of the things many hackers love to do when they learn a new technology or technique is implement “Yet Another %s” with it. Perhaps he just used “have” strictly.

Now a more interesting analysis would be not what a hacker is but what he isn’t. Many other problem-solvers and innovators seem to have characteristics and philosophies that seem to hopelessly clash with those of the hacker, yet they are clearly, to me at least, not hackers.