Difference between the terms Hacking and Cracking stated by Mert sir of Free Software Foundation !

Posted by anhad on 2024/11/19

Mert sir works at Free Software Foundation. He is my teacher and mentor at FSF from whom i am learning how to create Self-hosted server for website, verification of Freedom software packages and entry work of Freedom software replacements. I have learned the difference between the terms Hacking and Cracking from him.

Hacking is not only related with computers. Hacking means to explore and excel the skills but not stealing or cracking or exploiting something. So when we talk about computers, a hacker means someone who wants to improve his or her programming skills for understanding how computers work. Hackers do useful things. Contrary to the false belief, Hackers are not criminals.

Hacker is someone who is exploring limits of the related activity such as a Jazz improvisation with any instrument, or practicing martial arts in a clever way by following the martial arts culture, so the hacker culture itself and martial arts culture or Jazz culture are very similar thus we can say for all of them in short “hacker”. They are all hackers. To be honest there are different approaches in hacker culture and this pluralism is what we need and like, and we encourage hackers to make their own practices and follow their own methodologies to do good and useful things for the public.
freedom is good
openness is good
collaboration is good
privacy is good
we demand to do good and useful things for the public and do not want to rely on any technology so we are authors and we can make something better replacing existing information and technology.

Happy hacking means may the happy hacking be with you as a wish to the related person. The name of some hackers are Abhas sir, Mert sir and Richard sir.

Crackers are criminals who steal and crack using backdoors in proprietary softwares. This is why we give them the name “crackers” and they are criminals. The name of some crackers is Google (you-tube,gmail), Microsoft, Apple, Facebook (whatsapp, instagram, meta), Yahoo (yahoomail) etc.

This is the Proof of backdoors present in softwares created by companies selling proprietary software :

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html