The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

Eric Conspiracy
 n.

    A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a
    sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was
    doubtless influenced by the numerous ?Eric? jokes in the Monty Python
    oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in
    hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless
    they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric
    Allman (he of the ?Allman style? described under indent style) and Erik
    Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from more than a hundred
    others by email, and the organization line ?Eric Conspiracy Secret
    Laboratories? now emanates regularly from more than one site. See the Eric
    Conspiracy Web Page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

Eric Conspiracy

    A shadowy group of moustachioed hackers named
   Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
   talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986.  This was doubtless influenced
   by the numerous "Eric" jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.
   There do indeed seem to be considerably more moustachioed
   Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits
   can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.
   Well-known examples include Eric Allman (of the "Allman
   style" described under indent style), Erik Fair (co-author
   of NNTP), Eric S. Raymond and about fifteen others.  The
   organisation line "Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories" now
   emanates regularly from more than one site.

   [Jargon File]

   (1998-10-20)