The Hacker Ethic is not a set of guiding principles designed or built to promote the adaptation of programmers to development processes and business planning. And it shouldn't have to be.

Very well, you may want to train people within a different mindset prepared to fit into a process, acknowledge the existing rulebook and basically play nicely by it, working with others in developing business-oriented code for business purposes. But the Hacker Ethic is much more a cultural development for what was at its time mostly a subculture, than it is a series of well-defined principles for development. The Hacker Ethic emphasizes a series of value and skills that are perhaps way beyond a business development context - in that they belong much more in the future than they belong in the well-defined production/industrial contexts that we have come to tbe acquainted with.

So to put forth such an argument, that the Hacker Ethic harms developers' possibilities of conforming to market standards, is just that. It means conforming, thinking inside the box, and so on. Such is not the Hacker Ethic, and is not meant to be, and doesn't have to be. Just because there may be other, different objectives than those embodied in the HE, does not mean it needs to be put aside, transformed, or somehow modified. It's just different contexts.

The reason many people (myself included at some point) decide to use US-based services for different purposes is, in my view, quite reasonable. First of all, there's a matter of access: I can have access to much cheaper and better services via the web (i.e. web hosting) by choosing a foreign provider than a domestic one. Similarly for domain names - a generic .com domain hosted abroad costs about a tenth of what a similar domain would on my country's TLD.

The second possibility I see is more legally/politically concerned. It's much simpler for governments you may be trying to criticize to shut down your operation if it's based on a local provider than if it's based abroad - even if it's something as simple as it will take them longer to get it down.

So there's a reasoning behind using services abroad for your business or communication, and it is not necessarily "unwise". As for your comment - some very small scale operations will really have a hard time arranging for secondary providers and so on, so this might only be reserved for larger scale ops. I do agree with you in that it's very important - just perhaps not an option for anyone.

It will fade away slowly with time, until only four old geezers in the entire world, many, many years from now, are the only ones who can master that age-old, legendary art.

But then they will find an old nuclear missile satellite running on an old version of Unix which can only be hacked using CLI, and if it's not turned off (presumably right before Y2K38) it will launch a whole can of whopass and end the planet.

So they will have to send the old geezers up into space to turn off the satellite. Hilarity ensues.

I should probably write a movie script out of this. (Does that mean I should be on strike now?)