On Hacking - Richard Stallman
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On Hacking
In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly<br>illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
I went to lunch with some GNU fans, and was sitting down to eat some<br>tteokbokki (*), when a waitress set down six<br>chopsticks right in front of me. It occurred to me that perhaps these<br>were meant for three people, but it was more amusing to imagine that I<br>was supposed to use all six. I did not know any way to do that, so I<br>realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I<br>started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea.
First I used my left hand to put three chopsticks into my right hand.<br>That was not so hard, though I had to figure out where to put them so<br>that I could control them individually. Then I used my right hand to<br>put the other three chopsticks into my left hand. That was hard,<br>since I had to keep the three chopsticks already in my right hand from<br>falling out. After a couple of tries I got it done.
Then I had to figure out how to use the six chopsticks. That was<br>harder. I did not manage well with the left hand, but I succeeded in<br>manipulating all three in the right hand. After a couple of minutes<br>of practice and adjustment, I managed to pick up a piece of food using<br>three sticks converging on it from three different directions, and put<br>it in my mouth.
It didn't become easy—for practical purposes, using two chopsticks is<br>completely superior. But precisely because using three in one hand is<br>hard and ordinarily never thought of, it has "hack value", as my lunch<br>companions immediately recognized. Playfully doing something<br>difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
I later told the Korea story to a friend in Boston, who proceded to<br>put four chopsticks in one hand and use them as two pairs—picking up<br>two different pieces of food at once, one with each pair. He had<br>topped my hack. Was his action, too, a hack? I think so. Is he<br>therefore a hacker? That depends on how much he likes to hack.
The hacking community developed at MIT and some other universities in<br>the 1960s and 1970s. Hacking included a wide range of activities,<br>from writing software, to practical jokes, to exploring the roofs and<br>tunnels of the MIT campus. Other activities, performed far from MIT<br>and far from computers, also fit hackers' idea of what hacking means:<br>for instance, I think the controversial 1950s "musical piece" by John<br>Cage, 4'33" (****),<br>is more of a hack than a musical<br>composition. The palindromic three-part piece written by Guillaume de<br>Machaut in the 1300s, "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement", was also a good<br>hack, even better because it also sounds good as music. Puck<br>appreciated hack value.
It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as<br>hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is<br>playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means<br>exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful<br>cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack<br>value".
The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who<br>began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit<br>and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were<br>also doing something else, something different, for which they came up<br>with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful<br>piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such<br>and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful<br>they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is<br>a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a<br>hack on music.
Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that<br>administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For<br>instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is,<br>restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways<br>to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely,<br>and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to<br>be useful). However, only some hackers did this—many were occupied<br>with other kinds of cleverness, such as placing some amusing object on<br>top of MIT's great dome (**),<br>finding a way to do a certain computation with only 5 instructions<br>when the shortest known program required 6, writing a program to print<br>numbers in roman numerals, or writing a program to understand<br>questions in English. (Hacking does not have to be without practical use.)
Meanwhile, another group of hackers at MIT found a different solution<br>to the problem of computer security: they designed the Incompatible<br>Timesharing System without security "features". In the hacker's<br>paradise, the glory days of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, there was<br>no security breaking,...