Can the Hacker Ethic truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software? “For the love of Money or the Love of the Computer?”

All of us have heard it at one point or another, “Oh you study computers so you can help me do XYZ on my computer! You are a Godsend!” We dutifully acknowlege that yes we can fix that or show the person how to do XY or Z. Just yesterday I received a phone call from my mother asking me how she could use the computer to create a seating chart for the ball she was organizing. Of couse it would be rediculous to think my mother could open a computer and write a program to map out her seating chart, no instead she opens her word processor (Microsfot Word $100 Per Year Subscription) and types away at word. Even Microsoft Word itself as a program isn’t the simplest thing to use and my mom has to ask me a few more questions before she is on her way to creating a beautiful seating chart. This bring up the question why couldn’t my mom have wirtten a simple program herself to map all of the seats, why instead did she have to use a (rather expensive) commericial program to do? This question finds its answer in the thrid generation of hackers that the books calls the “Game Hackers.”

The books third kind of hackers come about in a new era of computing. This era of computing was different a two fundamental ways 1.) One did not have to pay $1000’s for the computer and 2.) One did not have to have much knowledge about how the comptuer works to be able to use it. No longer did one have to assemble their mail order kit to have a working computer, one could simply buy a fully functioning Apple II and away they went. With this new ease of use came something new that wasn’t in the industry before, people now wanted to be able to have fully functioning software that they could use right away and that would be useful or give them some entertainment value without haveing to do much to figure it out. Lets step back for a second and think about how the comptuers entered the living room, they didn’t really gradually enter it was more of a crashing through the roof of the Apple II, and due to this many many people had no idea the true power that lies in the art of programming your own computer; so these people accecpted that they would buy useful software and that would be that. If software was broken just pay more money for the latest and greatest update.

Hackers like Ken Williams took full advantage of this new thirst for software and the first software that people wanted was games. Games that they could use as an escape from reality, games with interesting storylines, games that they could play against their friends. The sad thing is people were willing to pay lots and lots of money for these games, so the hacker ethic in this third generation of hackers slowy and surly died out. No longer was free information like that of the past a top priority, no longer were these hackers writing code for the sake of the computer, now the only thing that spoke to the hackers was the green monster god of money. Taking one example from the previous generations of hackers is the Assembler that the MIT Hackers wrote for their PDP-1, it was free and open to anyone to use just sitting in the drawer near the computer. If there was a bug in this software someone else maybe with a little more knowledge would fix it or add a new feature. Now gone was that idea replaced by the thought that if you helped another company all you could do was lose money. Who does this end up hurting in the long run…the modern comsumer who is now forced to use less than optimal software that they have no idea/are not allowed to modify to fix any bugs or make better as in the MIT hackers did.

If people instead of being handed the computer and told here it is use it were instead to learn, even a tiny amount, how the computer works and how to go about controlling it through programming the modern computing scene today might be completly different. Instead of software giants that sell propritary software that makes millions we might have a much much broder open source market to the point where the hacker ethic, instead of being delegated to a few indiviudals who study computers, might be prevelent through all of the users. One big system where everyone works toward the free flow of information and toward devloping the best possible software that would be free for all to use. Devloping for the sake of money never has been and never will be a better alternative to developing for the sake of devloping soley to make things the best they can be. Maybe, sometime in the future, the hacker ethic will finally make its way into the hearts of all.