Hacker Action: Hardware

Be sure to check out Simon Garfinkel's article Hack License, which offers a short review of professor McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto and tries to set the record straight on some of the misgivings surrounding hackers. Well-know persona and keywords in this context scattered though the article, such as Marx, English, Stallman, Lessig and vectoralists, communists, open source.

Garfinkel comes with his own definition of hackers: "Hackers are people who use technical means to break restrictive rules and, as a result, create new possibilities." He notes that the real hacking action is in the hardware, but that the culture of software sharing might not be easily transposable to hardware:

The problem here is that sharing may work for software, but it doesn’t work for hardware. Moore’s Law has driven much of the computer revolution, but it requires that companies like Intel spend more and more money each year to create the next generation of superfast chips. Take away Intel’s copyright and patent protection, and knock-off companies would create clone Intel processors for a fraction of the cost. These chips would be dramatically cheaper than Intel’s, and Intel would not have the money to create the next generation of still-faster devices. Moore’s Law depends upon vectoral control.