Glory Days

I was never much of a hacker. Sure, I spent more than my share of time writing code—often until sunrise. I dined at the finest of campus vending machines, wore my hair and beard long, bushy, and wild, dwelt in a world populated almost entirely by men, dressed like a wannabe hippie, and (surprisingly) rarely dated.

I’m talking about hacking because while the bubble and the trial dom­inated the front pages, the rest of our information workers managed to keep themselves busy—hacking. Back in the bubble’s IPO heyday, Red Hat finished its first trading day up more than 500 percent, and the VA Linux (now VA Software) IPO soared to about 800 percent of its offer­ing price (still a record). But these companies weren’t dot-coms; they were (as the latter’s name implies), Linux companies. And it’s simply not possible to understand Linux without knowing at least something about hacking.

Hackers aren’t criminals, and hacking isn’t a criminal activity. While some hackers might like to think of themselves as engineers, they’re really artists. And like many artist communities, hackers do tend towards the subversive—but that’s a far cry from the criminal.

hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.... 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in “a Unix hacker.”... 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around....

cracker n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker.... There is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensa- tionalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture [of hackerdom]; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life.

hacker ethic n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise.............................................................. Almost

all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as... [the] Internet can function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hack- erdom’s most valuable intangible asset.

mundane n. [from SF fandom]... 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often used as an adjectival modifier.¹

Hackerdom has always been a positive environment driven by creativ­ity, productivity, a love of cleverness, and a penchant for jargon—not for destruction. And Linux is the sort of project that could have emerged only from hacker culture.

Linux is a powerful operating system developed under the open-source model. Linux defines a translation frontier that allows humans and microprocessors to communicate without passing through Microsoft’s platform bottleneck. That makes Microsoft nervous, even though, at least at the moment, most Linux users are IT professionals who use it to power servers rather than individual desktops.

If you find a committed Linux user and give him even a modicum of encouragement, she’d tell you both what Linux is and why it’s superior to any of its competitors. If she’s a true hacker, though, you probably won’t understand her answer, because she’s likely to tell you that: “Linux is a freely distributable Unix clone for 386/486/Pentium based PCs.”³ Many of the mundane, who would be the only ones to ask such a ques­tion, might find this response somewhat less than edifying.

Unix is an important operating system first developed at Bell Labs in the late 1960s and early 70s. Unix’s popularity among hackers stemmed from its combination of simplicity, transparency, flexibility, and power. The revolutionary symbiosis between the Unix operating system and the C programming language enabled computer scientists to navigate multi­ple layers of the translation chain—from a bit above the hardware all the way up to the actual frontier—using a single language. But Unix also had its limitations. Most users have very little interest in accessing trans­lation layers beneath the frontier. In fact, every upward evolution of the frontier convinces a new batch of potential users that they can overcome their technophobia to become actual users. And they are unlikely to want to pop the hood to see how it works. To new users, Unix looked like a slightly more confusing version of DOS, because like DOS, Unix is a line­command (rather than a graphical) operating system. But the daunting operating system was fine for its purpose. Most versions of Unix were designed to run on minicomputers and workstations, machines that were both much more powerful and much more expensive than the contem­poraneous PCs that most casual users favored.

Those differences divided the computing world well into the 1990s.

And so, two paragraphs of deconstruction later, we’re able to parse most of the hacker definition of Linux. All that’s left is the “freely dis­tributable” part. And that’s a story in and of itself...