I think there's a bit of an attempt to retroactively broaden the historical scope of this specific usage of "hacker", though, which is part of the confusion. Until at least the mid/late-1980s, "hacker" in this sense was more or less local MIT slang, used at MIT itself and at some MIT-linked organizations (the FSF, Symbolics, Lucid, etc.). I don't believe it was in use by people doing similar things in other locations, without MIT ties. For example, nowadays people cite Woz and the Homebrew Computer Club as archetypical examples of the hacker ethos, but as far as I know, they didn't use the term themselves in that period to describe what the HCC was doing.
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I think there's a bit of an attempt to retroactively broaden the historical scope of this specific usage of "hacker", though, which is part of the confusion. Until at least the mid/late-1980s, "hacker" in this sense was more or less local MIT slang, used at MIT itself and at some MIT-linked organizations (the FSF, Symbolics, Lucid, etc.). I don't believe it was in use by people doing similar things in other locations, without MIT ties. For example, nowadays people cite Woz and the Homebrew Computer Club as archetypical examples of the hacker ethos, but as far as I know, they didn't use the term themselves in that period to describe what the HCC was doing.