Hacker ethic

Hacker ethic is a term for the moral values and philosophy that are common in the hacker community. Whilst the philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s-1960s, the term hacker ethic is attributed to journalist Steven Levy as described in his 1984 book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The key points within this ethic are access, freedom of information, and improvement to quality of life. While some tenets of hacker ethic were described in other texts like Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) by Ted Nelson, Levy appears to have been the first to document both the philosophy and the founders of the philosophy.