Hackers in the Bazaar

Steven Levy wrote that Paul Graham was a "hacker philosopher" and his writings certainly show. Graham comes across as every philosophy grad student does: desperate to legitimize his work as cool and meaningful in the eyes of his peers. Hiding behind pedantic nitpicks over definitions, Graham attempts to elevate typing on a keyboard into a form of high art. In his piece "Hackers and Painters" Graham desperately seeks to make the point that while other computer scientists are foolishly content to allow themselves to be mislabeled, he and his hacker brethren choke under the oppressive yolk of "scientist". Throughout the piece Graham meanders through a series of critiques about higher education and how it doesn't suit the kind of work hackers do. Ultimately this leads me to wonder why he felt the need to pursue such education in the first place. It seems that what Graham truly wants is to divorce himself from the ideas of traditional programming. He whin...

I think it's fair to say that the hacker ethic is in many ways incompatible with modern society. While some aspects of the ethics live on in the form of the modern open source movement, and the culture of some companies, in many ways, the hacker ethic is well and truly dead. Today corporate American has steadily subsumed the hacker ethic until what is left can only be called an empty shell of its former glory. Nowhere is this more clear than in the business practices of Microsoft. Early on Bill Gates penned the now infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" decrying the rate at which hobbyists were freely sharing copies of Microsoft software. From then on Microsoft would lead the charge in locking down software via proprietary methods and aggressively pursuing those it found to distribute their code without permission. Microsoft was not satisfied with just making sure people paid for their software, however. They wanted to ensure theirs was the only software people were using at...