Politics and hackers

Some hackers tend to be very liberal and some very conservative. People like Eric Raymond tend to be conservative and lean towards an Ayn Randian objectivist view(See Atlas Shrugged). As were some hackers such as Randall Munroe who has endorsed Obama as a presidential candidate in the 2008 American campaign. The Jargon File has an entry on hackers and politics. All though you may want to keep in mind that it is maintained by Eric S. Raymond.

The punk scene, The open source scene, a comparison

Maybe on the top these are to unlikely candidates to compare as an equal, but really the spirit of both is the same. The true spirit is the same, the balls to the walls, diy duct tape and deal with it. I would call them the two biggest scene proponents of diy. The is feeling of animus, a sort of primal scream of "If I can't do it, it can't be done." You have two groups of people innovating when vast amounts of money were required to innovate, and they had none. In the punk scene you have people like Emmerson Lake and Palmer with 7 minute technical solos, the kind of practice and skill to perform these songs requiring vast amount of time to acquire. But suddenly some "punks" would get on stage and thrash about wildly, hit a lot of wrong notes and finish a song under two minutes, and it was almost a joke, but you had a feeling your record collection was obsolete. Now you have programmers, making solutions for free on the same problems software companies are throwing gobs of money at to fix.
Sure both groups have their internal quibbles,did the punk scene start in the US with the Ramones or the UK with the Sex Pistols? GNU or BSD License? But fundamentally the DIY spirit is still there.