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The Hacker Emblem was first proposed in October 2003 by Eric S. Raymond, who claimed a need for a unifying and recognizable symbol for his perception of hacker culture. This does not refer to the hackers breaking into computers, but to the hacker culture around BSD, MIT, GNU, Linux, Perl, etc.; that is, the community around free software and open source.

Raymond suggests that "by using this emblem, you express sympathy with hackers' goals, hackers' values, and the hacker way of living".

The image itself is a representation of a glider formation in Conway's Game of Life.

Hackers also associate and represent themselves with mascots from notable free and open source projects such as the GNU Project's "Gnu" or more commonly the Linux kernel's "Tux". The "Dust Puppy" from the web comic User Friendly is also commonly associated with Hackers, Internet culture, and free and open source communities due to the strip's coverage of those topics.

It is widely believed that this particular symbol came into popularity with the invention of the Game of Life, by John Conway, as this particular configuration will transfer itself in a gliding fashion across the board.

Other representations

Other means to display the image have evolved, mostly relying on ASCII art. Examples include:

|_|0|_|           0 1 0     . o .
|_|_|0|           0 0 1     . . o
|0|0|0|           1 1 1     o o o

And even 010001111

Minimal ASCII representation

On February 12, 2008, the minimal ASCII representation was incorporated into Raymond's list of canonical representations:

 .
..:

Minimal UTF-8 representation

Braille characters present in the UTF-8 charset can also be used to produce a single-line representation:

⠠⠵

See also

• Hacker ethic
• Hacker (programmer subculture)

References

1. the Hacker Emblem page on Eric S. Raymond's site
2. Raymond, Eric (2008-02-12). "Re: Hacker Emblem". Retrieved 2008-02-13. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• The Glider: Proposal for a Hacker Emblem Contains more information on the Hacker Emblem proposal, including SVG and TeX sources and FAQs.
• "How To Become a Hacker" A document explaining the hacker culture.

• Hacking (programmer subculture)
• Cellular automata in popular culture
• Symbols