It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.

People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.

The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".

Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.

If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.