[blhack]

Despite what the common perception of hackers is, we're actually highly community driven. Look at places like HN. Look at the concept of the hackerspace, or the computing clubs that preceded them.

Jonathan's card was in the same spirit as a hacker space, which is [bluntly]: if we all pitch into this, and we're all nice about it, we can have something that's pretty freaking cool.

Assume that instead of a starbucks card, we were talking about a hackerspace. What Sam Odio did was the equivalent of showing up, then taking a bunch of the the tools so that he could sell them and donate the money to homeless people. To take it a step farther he then used his website to encourage other people to do the same thing.

He tried to destroy the community (and succeeded). Hackers love communities, and they tend to hate the people that destroy them.

[gruseom]

In fact, Sam Odio is a very community-minded person. He started the original Hacker House in Palo Alto (http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com/). He was an early enthusiast for the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View (http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/w/page/25442/Incubees). More significantly, when other people were offering advice to an unemployed hacker, it was Sam who offered his couch for a few weeks (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827635). I'll add a personal data point: he once insisted on giving my co-founder and me a ride to the train station even though it was completely out of his way and we had only met a few minutes earlier. Trivial, yes, but trivial indicators of decency are often the most reliable, especially when no one is watching.

My 2¢ is that Sam seems to process social norms in an unconventional way and it occasionally gets him into a pickle. It also leads to good things. More good than bad, I'd bet.

[blhack]

I'm sure he's a great person. I'm not speaking against his character, just explaining why hackers would be upset about this.

[gruseom]

You did speak against his character. You said he tried to destroy a community. That is not the action of a "great person".

You began from the assumption that Sam is not one of us, the "highly community-driven" hackers. That's factually wrong. He's practically a prototype of the community-minded hackerspace type which you extol.

I don't agree with you that people are upset because they care about communities. A readier explanation is just garden-variety sanctimony. (I'm not referring to your comment here, but others.)