I disagree with this, let's not forget RMS did a lot of "cracking" himself, like the ITS password hack and some shady things like reverse engineering code from

I disagree with this, let's not forget RMS did a lot of "cracking" himself, like the ITS password hack and some shady things like reverse engineering code from Symbolics and gave it to Lisp Machine. GeoHotz did a hard and ingenious hack to get his ps3 to do things it's not longer suposed to do. That's not cracking per se. I think cracking mostly happens with things like these folks did. Using a simple SQL injection (probably automated) to hack Sony's site. It's all in the ingenuity level. That where the distinction should be.