Okay, let me say this again in here, because it's more applicable: a hacker is an aesthete. No more, no less. That's where both the positive <i>and</i> the negative connotations of a "hack" come from--hackers judge things on their beauty/elegance/cleverness/Quality/whatever other term you want to use for an aesthetic scale, <i>not</i> on their moral or ethical worth/utility. Both the amateur crackers who break into systems for fun, and the FOSS writers, are "hackers" in the truest sense of the word, because they're both doing things that appeal to their aesthetic senses.<p>Of course, <i>artists</i> are also, by and large, aesthetes. The differences between "hacker" and "artist" are sort of fuzzy, really: hackers don't necessarily create, while artists are usually expected to; artists usually specialize in a given form or medium, while hackers aren't expected to—in fact, a hacker is usually interested in as many forms of aesthetic expression as they can get their hands on (although, for some reason, they usually don't like the fine arts—this is probably more to do with the connotations of fine art and its relationship to intelligence in Western culture than anything else.) More precisely, though, a hacker is mostly interested in <i>new</i> forms of aesthetic expression, where the "classics" haven't yet solidified and there's no canon skills or methods required before one may dive in. da Vinci would be both a hacker and an artist in his own period, but brought forward to today he would merely be the latter.<p>"Hacker" could be replaced in this day and age with "aesthete" and lose almost none of its meaning (or "neophile aesthete" and lose none at all.)