[christefano]

How would you define it? My definition of a hacker is someone who creatively and safely overcomes or circumvents limitations and enjoys the challenge.

[mynameishere]

Roughly, someone who is unquestionably a hacker has to identify you as such. It's clearly a cultural thing, and that defies objective measurement.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that

I think pg sometimes types faster than he thinks. The same person who designed NT designed VMS. Richard Stallman (iirc) wanted to use VMS instead of Unix as a basis when he started GNU but couldn't for some reason. At bottom, there is nothing wrong with NT, aside from open-source nonsense (hack the kernel lately? No?). Is there anything preventing great work on Windows? No, no, no. And I would suggest that John Carmack is a better coder than all of you put together, but since he's willingly used NT, he's evidentally no great hacker. Hence, it is more culture- than technology- or product-based.

[dfranke]

ESR has a pretty good answer to that: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

See especially the first question in the FAQ.

[bct]

Why qualify it with "safely"?

[rms]

to disqualify malicious hackers, probably