Hackers should be judged by their hacking. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better. It captured all that hackers were about, and it immediately became their guide. Now hackers are a powerful body of minds that gather on the net, and they fight for the right to have access to all information, and if its not given to them, they take it.
Hackers believe that to hoard information for profit is to hurt society, to slow progress.
They hack in order to free information, because they believe that information wants, needs to be free. But that s not the only reason they hack. Hackers are, at heart, romantics. They believe that they are fighting the good fight, for the benefit of all mankind. But in the case of many, and probably most, ideologies throughout history, their cause, their words, are often only a rationalization for their actions.