Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Eric Raymond, the author of the Cathedral and the

Bizarre, and a key figure in the evolution and understanding of the open source movement, Eric

Welcome to Econ Talk. I want to talk about the ideas in your book, the Cathedral and the

Bizarre, which is one of the most stimulating and informative books I've read in a long

time. To get us started, let's cover some background for our non-technical listeners. You call

yourself a hacker, but you use that word to mean something different from the normal mainstream

media use of the term. What is a hacker? The media use of the term is corrupt and wrong. You'd

have a lot of reporters nowadays wanting to think that a hacker is a person who commits computer

crimes and breaks security on the scene. This is not the correct sense of the word. Properly,

a hacker is a number of a culture or a connected group of cultures that has existed since

about 1960 and hackers built programs and give away software. In particular, one of the things that

we did is build the internet on the worldwide web. Nowadays, we work on Linux and a lot of related

open source development. The reason the term hacker got hijacked is because crackers, people who

break security generally aren't very skilled. They know that the people in the real hacker culture

are more skilled. Therefore, they sort of appropriated that term for themselves in order to sound

more capable than they actually are usually. You're persisting in using the word correctly.

That's right, because there isn't a better word for the members of this culture.

It reminds me of the appropriation of the word liberal, which in the 19th century meant

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