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After stating those principles, the letter takes an interesting turn, as Zuckerberg begins a rant about what he calls “The Hacker Way.”

I have to admit Zuckerberg’s treatment of hackers here is personally gratifying. Thirty years ago, I began writing a book about hackers, a subculture that most people did not know even existed. As I researched the book, I discovered a way of thinking, a way of being, shared among hackers of different generations. In my book Hackers, I codified this collective sense of values, calling it the Hacker Ethic. In many ways those implicit values are what basis of The Hacker Way that Zuckerberg describes in his letter.

For instance, one of the precepts of what I identified as the Hacker Ethic was, “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, race, or position.” Zuckerberg writes in his letter, “Hacker culture is … extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.”

While elucidating the Hacker Ethic, I referred to the “doing, not talking about it” aspect of hacking, calling the impulse “The Hands-On Imperative.” Zuckerberg addresses this, too. “Hacking is …an inherently hands-on and active discipline,” he writes. And he has shaped his company to embody that value.

In my book, I wrote, “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work and using this knowledge to create new and interesting things…. This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken and needs improvement.”

Zuckerberg writes, “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”

Obviously, I am pleased that Zuckerberg has identified the aspects of hacking that I wrote about in 1984 as key components in making a company successful. But what about the very first part of the Hacker Ethic, the one that continues to resonate in controversy? I am talking about a key characteristic of hackers as I saw them, an implicit belief that “information should be free.” (Later on some people clarified that this meant “free as in freedom, not as in beer.”)

Much more:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuckerberg-hacker/