Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".
Historically, the hackers at MIT chose the term "hacker" to simply describe themselves and other people with a similar attitude. Later, the mass media misused this term to describe solely criminal actors, which then became the mainstream understanding of the term.
So the mass media, not the hackers, were using the term with another meaning than everybody else (at that time).
> Seriously, is that just too hard or asks for too much playfulness?
I'd put it the other way around: Is is just too hard for the mass media or asks for too much playfulness to respect a (minority) group's self-chosen name?
> Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".
Small correction: This is true for the greater part of the German population. However, within groups like the CCC or FSFE, the term "Hacker" has a much broader meaning, quite similar to what RMS describes.
In other words: Even in Germany, the people who are usually called "Hacker" use themselves the term in a broader sense. I think this is simply an international phenomena.
My point is this: Hackers are still great hackers, if they call themself differently. And then they would spend considerably more time solving "hard" problems "playful" instead of discussing about words who actually don't matter at all.
Mass media calls people whatever makes the most money for them. They are happy with that. And they have won the masses in this case. So hey, let's go on to the next fight.
"Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think."