Is the hacker culture disappearing from open-source development as corporate IT shops embrace the concept?
The hacker community has always been doing its work from the margins. That does not mean that it wasn’t important in the past, and it does not mean it won’t be important in the future. But it remains non-mainstream. At the same time, the commercial community has benefited tremendously from rebellious hackers. When a hacker points out that a particular protocol has great security weaknesses, the commercial community who pays attention to that is better for it. The commercial community that attempts to cover it up or deny it puts more people at risk. Michael Tiemann, Red Hat Inc.’s vice president of open-source affairsIs there something that the OSI can do to make hackers feel more comfortable in the changing open-source environment, where large companies like IBM pay employees for such work? The fact that IBM has a large team doing open-source development is great, and many of the people doing that work for IBM are hackers. They are renegades that just happen to get their paychecks from
