It would seem that two days ago, some guy, tri-letterized as ESR, thought it'd be a good idea to create an emblem for the entire hacker community. While I agree that having such a thing might be a good idea, he could have at least asked that same community if they agreed with him about the emblem.

Let me show it to you:

Clickable to get to the page he made about it. In my opinion, it sucks. If you need to write a webpage about an emblem to explain what it means, you should consider stepping out of the emblem-making-business. In fact, I think this pretty much says enough: "About half the hackers this idea was alpha-tested on instantaneously said "Wow! Cool!" without needing any further explanation." Great. So half of the knowledgeable people you spoke to about it knew what it was. A (very) rough estimate on my side tells me that anywhere between zero and five percent of the folks browsing the internet will understand it. What use is an emblem if 95% of the people who will ever see it have no clue what it means, and what it stands for?

Now, this guy also maintains the Hacker-HOWTO, jargon, and some other things. Then I found this on his "Who is ESR?" page: "I'm a long-time hacker"; and then this: Today I'm one of the half-dozen or so most influential people in that movement; in fact, a lot of people would put me among the top three, with Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman."

This struck me as weird. I distictly recall reading something about self-proclaimed hackers in his howto and how real hackers don't call themselves as such, so I went looking for it. It wasn't there. Makes me wonder..