Maybe wrong place for the question, but I couldn't find the answer.The wiki says he's software engineer and hacker. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)Is it true?I must tell I haven't heard any of the meaning in the answers.I must quote a book (it's Hungarian, I am not from England, so please correct my spelling):It's a frequently asked question that who is a cracker and who is a hacker.  In my opinion hacker is someone who is looking for a challenge,   he doesn't want any trouble, so he doesn't do any.  He has great knowledge, well prepared, he knows what does he do, and why.  (...)So the meaning of the word hacker isn't so clear.Thanks for the answers!
Is Linus Torvalds a hacker?
linux;history;terminology
RMS (the founder of GNU and original author of gcc and emacs) has a nice summation of the etymology of hacking including how it came to have a pejorative meaning.  The pejorative one continues to be the most titillating to most people, while the non-perjoritive one has, as RMS says, strong anti-authority overtones, so most people will conflate them, because, Even if what you are doing isn't wrong, it's still not right.  This has to do with the traditional meaning of the word hack, which is something done not exactly wrong but not exactly right, either. In general English usage, a hack is someone who is amateurish (or not so good) at something and thus may tend to improvise (due to lack of knowledge and experience); this is also used in programming (Here's a hack solution... meaning quickly improvised).  Seems to me this is not coincidence, but hacker is more positive than negative, whereas hack (noun referring to a person, as in, He's a hack) is more negative than positive.  The positive angle being: sometimes that hack (noun referring to the quickly improvised solution) turns out to be a genuine breakthrough.  Probably this was more or less normative on the frontiers of computer science in the late 20th century -- even the biggest talents would have been regularly hacking away at stuff no one completely understood.So as RMS says, a hack may be a somewhat ingenious or unpredicted solution, and a hacker someone who solves problems in ingenious or unpredictable ways. Linus is famous for linux, which is really a hack on (or of) unix, in all senses (presumably at first it was amateurish).  But he didn't steal source code from Bell Labs or anything to do it. 