I found it interesting that her big counter-example to Levy's hacker ethic concerned the modification of hardware. And shared hardware at that. There is a difference of kind rather than degree when it comes to modifying software because software never needs to be shared. That is, you can copy data, modify it to your heart's content, and never affect the original owner of the data.

This does bring up a bunch of interesting points about shared software and data, like who owns it. But one can imagine a world where all software is open, which means anyone is trivially able to hang a shingle and start a new node, but the only really "owned" stuff is the data users have put into it.