The term hacker began life as a term of respect for someone you acknowledge as a masterful programmer, someone capable of taking the most basic idea and creating a workable project out of it, someone who seemed able to overcome almost any problem that arose in their path, a term awarded only to the elite of programmers and valued accordingly.
Within the hacker ethos contained several core values, to name a few they were unrestricted acess, freedom of information and to never cause harm. The idea of unrestricted access was that no part of the network or any terminal shall be closed off behind locked doors, in todays world such a value would no doubt apply almost exclusively to systems to which the public has access.
Where the term began to become corrupt was when crackers began to quote the hacker ethos of unrestricted access, media sources in search of a name to call these people came across the hacker culture to which they immediately found a direct connection, and so began the journalistic misuse of the term hacker.
In 1985 hackers in defence against journalistic misuse of the term hacker coined the term cracker as a solution to this problem, unfortunately the damage had already been done and the term never took much popularity, almost 24 years later and we're still struggling to give it back its true meaning.
Today the term hacker doesn't carry quite so much prowess that it once did, it simply means to modify something to do something it wasn't designed to do, such as the popular example "she hacked her text editor to render html". There are software hackers and hardware hackers alike, but most hardware hackers prefer to call themselves modders.
The hackibility of GNU/Linux gained it the nickname "the hackers' os", the sharing of code was part of the hacker culture and the sharing of subsequent modifications to that code was mainly good manners. It is because of hackers that GNU/Linux exists, and it is because of hackers that it continues to be what it is, a place of choice, freedom and unrestricted access.
