I’ve recently been doing a bit of research on something called the Hackers Ethic, and I cannot help but find striking similarities between it and the concepts of Open source software, and the Agile development methodology.  Don’t get me wrong, by no means am I hear to poke fun at Open Source software or the Agile methodology, I am a big fan of it personally and if I had to chose a method to develop anything that would be it.  I cannot help but wonder if open source and agile development is more of a main stream version of the “Hacker” mentality of the 80’s.  Wikipedia lists the main ethics of a hacker as follows:

1.       Sharing

2.       Openness

3.       Decentralization

4.       Free Access to Computers

5.       World Improvement

Now, you have to keep in mind that this was created in a time when computers where not located in more than half of the computers in north America, when most people did not have access to one of these machines, let alone the internet. 

The similarities I find are fairly obvious actually, the openness, sharing, and world improvement are aimed towards the open source software in comparison as this is one of the main concepts behind it.  The idea that I do what I can the best, than allow anyone access to do go and improve upon that and release it again to the “community.”  Even throughout the article on Wikipedia and the other sources I have been reading, terms such as “egoless programming” seem to pop up… these terms are commonly thought to be part of the Agile methodology, and I even remember it plastered over the walls of our computer science lab.

Now I have to pose the question on whether or not it is a good thing that Agile and open source software bares such a close resemblance to the Hackers ethic of the 80’s.  From a conventional standpoint hackers are bad, evil people who live for no other reason than to cause problems.  From a matter of concept however Hackers are simply individuals who see the potential for computers to enrich and enhance our lives beyond where we currently are, individuals who believe in free speech and freedom of information, individuals who are willing to stand up to conventional laws and moral beliefs and make people question The Man.  Don’t get me wrong, like any other belief set there are always so many different versions of beliefs that you will always get the extremist who uses the cover of being an ethical hacker to sell credit card information and such… but from a strict concept point of view, maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that our industry is moving more towards those concepts of the Ethical Hacker and further away from the conventional thought process of The Man.