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Etats-Unis

On en parle dans… The New York Times
"[Himanen's] survey of the core components of the hacker ethic ... is as comprehensive and instructive as any to date ... Himanen has a powerful grasp on that strangely intoxicating contradiction that is open-source." (The New York Times)

On en parle dans… Slashdot.org
"The Hacker Ethic is a brilliant book. ... this little book blows away the myth that getting important things done requires stodgy and outmoded forms of organization, or a slavish devotion to work. Just the opposite -- Himanen demonstrates with modern and historical examples that there's a sea change underway in the way that work happens. ... This book will be read, re-read and passed on -- if you're employed by someone else, I suggest reading it and (as applicable) giving your copy to your boss, former boss or future boss." (Slashdot.org)

On en parle dans… Slate
"The Hacker Ethic is engagingly written and provocative, and indubitably commendable in its vision of a transformation of how all of us relate to our working life ... We should all be more like hackers." (Slate)

On en parle dans… The Star-Ledger
"[T]his is a wonderful little book, engaging, impassioned and lucid." (The Sunday Star-Ledger)

On en parle dans… The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[I]ntriguing insight into how computer specialists look at the world ... as computer technology advances, the hacker ethic is a way of living that is becoming more prevalent. Everyone would benefit from being exposed to it." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

On en parle dans… The Philadelphia Inquirer
"[S]prightly, ruminative essay about cyberethics. ... The Hacker Ethic is a heartbreaking work of staggering idealism, a welcome hacker-as-hippie reminder in an era when dot-com despair keeps obscuring the original non-commercial ethos of the Web. ... The Hacker Ethic rewards readers by making its points in the playful and creative spirit it promotes." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

On en parle dans… Sarasota Herald Tribune
"Thanks to Pekka Himanen, I have been enlightened. Hackers are good. They play with things until they break, but from that breakage comes insight that drives development." (Sarasota Herald Tribune)

Royaume-Uni

On en parle dans… Financial Times
"[The Hacker Ethic] is a thoroughly spirited and commendable framework for human creativity" (Financial Times)

On en parle dans… Scotland on Sunday
"[The Hacker Ethic] provide[s] an antidote to the dotcom brainwashing we get from politicians and business people, who have much to say about the commercial possibilities of the world wide web, but nothing about its cultural potential." (Scotland on Sunday)

On en parle dans… The New Statesman
"To learn more about the ideology of the information age, you should also read Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic. The book is introduced by Linus Torvalds, the Finnish software writer who created Linux, the operating system that now represents the most serious challenge to Microsoft's Windows. In fact, 'created' is not quite right. Torvalds is a hacker, in the best, non-destructive sense of the word, rather than a businessman. From the beginning, Linux was conceived as an open system. Its 'source code' is available to anybody who wants to tinker with it (a good deal of the Microsoft issue hinges on its refusal to release its source code). As a result of this unpaid tinkering by thousands of hackers, Linux has become a spectacularly stable system - although, probably for the same reason, it is not yet sufficiently user-friendly to attract the average computer user.

This open ideal, in which nobody owns anything and people work unpaid, becomes in Himanen's book a new model for work. Good hacking - as opposed to what Himanen calls 'cracking' - is a form of intensive, creative play. Historically, he locates it as a move away from the masochistic Protestant work ethic and back to something like the pre-Reformation idea of work as an almost casual aspect of a life lived in the light of a higher truth - salvation in Catholicism, freedom in the information age. Gates's betrayal was that, having started out as a hacker, he became a full-blooded Protestant. In Microsoft, 'the profit motive has taken precedence over passion'.

I think there is a general truth here. Information technology is changing work patterns, and much of what Himanen says about the peculiar nature of information technology is accurate. But the picture he paints is bleaker than he realises. The hacker ideology is anarchic and, as a result, it offers nothing to those excluded from the new technology by inclination or inability. Furthermore, its love of the dissemination of information makes it inimical to the transmission of knowledge. By what standards are we to judge this flood of information? The hacker, being too radically anti-authoritarian, cannot say.

The game is given away by Manuel Castells in his epilogue to the book: 'Cultural expression,' he writes, 'becomes patterned around the kaleidoscope of a global, electronic hypertext.' Or, to put it another way, in the new world, nobody will recognise the name of Joseph K." (The New Statesman)

On en parle dans… The Times
"ANY BOOK written about hackers and the world of computer programming must first overcome a number of misconceptions: the first is the word hacker, which today is more often associated with computer crime than with innovation; the second is that computer programmers are regarded, perhaps unfairly, as a tribe of nerds.

There is much to commend the hacker philosophy; hackers believe in a Utopia where information is shared, problems are solved and people are helped. Only by pooling knowledge are hackers able to indulge their passion for solving computer riddles. Strange though it may seem, hackers simply enjoy the experience of distributing the lessons that they have learnt. "The reward for participating in this discussion is peer recognition," writes Himanen. It is the closest Silicon Valley has come to socialism, and the hacker value system stands in stark contrast to the undignified stampede that we have seen in the Internet goldrush.

True hackers make a million out of a program and then give it all up to teach children. They loathe Bill Gates, whom they regard as a traitor because he discovered so much and then let only those who were willing to pay benefit from that knowledge. This book confirms that hackers inhabit a world ungoverned by conventional business practices and that the great discoveries of the computer age are made in the back rooms with the burning of much midnight oil and not in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. " (The Times)

 

Allemagne

On en parle dans… Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"So reibungslos, wie gelegentlich zu fuerchten, werden sich Revolutionaere womoeglich doch nicht in Unternehmer verwandeln. Gerade erst hat der finnische Technophilosoph Pekka Himanen gemeinsam mit Linus Torvalds, dem Guru der open source, und dem Soziologen Manuel Castells "The Hacker Ethic" (Random House, New York) veroeffentlicht. Darin wird ein neues Arbeitsethos entworfen, das nicht bloss Max Webers allfaellige protestantisch-kapitalistische Variante im Staub zuruecklaesst, sondern sich anschickt, Augustinus' suendiges Freitagsmalochen mit der paradiesischen Unterhaltung des Sonntags zu vereinbaren. In der network ethic, von Kennern zu "Nethic" verkuerzt, soll der Mammon im brueder- und schwesterlichen Teilen von Information entmachtet werden. "Es gibt keine technologischen Revolutionen ohne kulturelle Transformation", schreibt Himanen. Aber auch er kann eine gewisse Unsicherheit bei der Umsetzung seines heilbringenden "Informationalismus" nicht verbergen". (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)