2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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UTSL
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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// , n. [Unix] On-line acronym for Use the Source, Luke (a pun on Obi-Wan
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Kenobi's Use the Force, Luke! in Star Wars ) analogous to RTFS (sense 1),
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but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be
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better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing
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confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals,
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or broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted wizard s to
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answer them. Once upon a time in elder days , everyone running Unix had
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source. After 1978, AT T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in
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theory appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix
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source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely
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for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost
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anyone on the network without concern. Nowadays, free Unix clones have
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become widely enough distributed that anyone can read source legally. The
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most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and
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4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source
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such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
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