Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no
means universally, accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe to the
hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and giving away
open-source software. A few go further and assert that
all information should be free and
any proprietary control of it is bad; this is the
philosophy behind the GNU project.
Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of
cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the
belief that ‘ethical’ cracking excludes destruction at least
moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as ‘benign’
crackers (see also samurai, gray
hat). On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of
hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the
sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account,
exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged — acting as
an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.
The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic
is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks,
software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers.
Huge cooperative networks such as Usenet,
FidoNet and the Internet itself can function without
central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a
sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible
asset.
