It's like a disease endemic to us nerds. Honestly who looks at the word "hack" and thinks hey i'm gonna make a white hat form of this? An OS called GNU?? Linus was lucky he had a buddy in marketing to help him name the kernel otherwise we'd have something like the clusterfuck in gnome & kde packages.
"Hacker" is a bit like the term "witch" in the Wizard of Oz.<p>"Are you a good hacker, or a bad hacker?"<p>The techniques and thinking styles are the same, either way.