But I've been very explicit about this question:
"Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it."
(http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)
"So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that."
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
The relevant section is called "Two Routes." Linus seems to have taken organic route, gradually arranging his life so he could spend more time on Linux. Startups are usually an instance of the other strategy, the two-job route, of which they are the most extreme form.
(For a few very lucky people, a startup can also be one's life's work. But it's usually all one can do to make a startup succeed without also satisfying that constraint.)
Both making a lot of money and doing a "seriously successful" open source project are pretty rare, so even if the two are independent, you shouldn't expect many people to succeed at both of them.
I think that hackers, however, have an appreciation for the system. Hackers want to learn about complex systems work, but they have a profound respect for those complex systems. Thus, they're not engaged in the business of getting rich no matter what the cost to others.
All the people I know who only want to get rich end up in jobs that promise that. But they are all jobs that reek of unsustainability, like wall street traders and dot-com-type startups with a lot of hype and no business model or valuable contribution to society. These people are selfish and as we're seeing (and have seen during a thousand years of business cycles) their money is gone as quickly as it came.
No it is not. I love HN, but most people here accept the distorted definition of a hacker.
Hacker culture had nothing to do with money, only lately, and PG is partially guilty of this, "hacker" started to associate with "21 year old internet millionaire" in the minds of many.