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424 Pekka Himanenone of the founders of Sun Microsystems, describes the passion that drove thecompany: “We were twenty-something-year-olds running a company and wehad just met, but we certainly shared the passion” (Southwick, 1999; see alsoAlahuhta and Himanen, forthcoming).It is a creative passion that is referred to here. In their work, hackers realizetheir creativity and constantly develop themselves. Hackers play with newideas and are enthusiastic about this work. And this creativity takes placetogether with other hackers, either virtually or physically: hacker creativity isbased upon an open and shared development of ideas. It is about belonging toa group whose members have the same creative passion, give recognition toeach other’s contributions, and develop ideas further together.A significant additional feature of the hacker ethic is that the archetypalhacker works to the rhythm of his or her creativity. This is the image of thehacker sometimes programming into the small hours of the night and thenwaking up in the afternoon, or mixing work and leisure in their daily lives inother ways. They take advantage of the possibilities of IT to manage their timemore freely.Together, these features make up the two core elements of the hacker relationshipto work: (1) a networked creative passion; and (2) a flexible relationshipto time. What is important here is that, although information technologyhackers were the first to become self-conscious about this new work ethic,they realized that the work ethic is not limited to information technologyprofessionals. In fact, from the beginning, the hacker Jargon file said that ahacker can be “an expert or enthusiast of any kind.”It was in this general sense that I proposed in my book, The Hacker Ethicand the Spirit of the Information Age, the expression the “hacker ethic” todescribe the work culture of the informational economy, as a counterpart toWeber’s “Protestant ethic” in the industrial economy. I still prefer this expressionbecause it was the first “real-life” expression for the new general workethic. Nowadays, however, the “hacker ethic” has problematic connotationsthat are not meant here. First of all, to many people it immediately bringscomputer criminals to mind. Second, for other people it conjures up only themost idealist version of the work ethic, such as the ideology of the mostextreme forms of the open-source software movement (everything is “fun”and everything must be open).To avoid these misunderstandings, expressions such as the “culture of innovation,”the “innovation work ethic,” or the “creative work ethic” can be usedas alternatives for the “hacker ethic” (I would recommend using the “cultureof innovation” in most contexts). Outside academic circles and those of theinformation technology hackers themselves, these alternative expressionsbetter convey the idea of a more general new work ethic, which is not limitedto information technology jobs. They also link the new work culture explicitly