<
humour, programming> (UTSL) (A pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's "
Use
the Force,
Luke!" in "Star Wars") A more polite version of
RTFS. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would
be better off reading
the source code that supports whatever
feature is causing confusion, rather than making yet another
futile pass through
the manuals, or broadcasting questions on
Usenet that haven't attracted
wizards to answer them.
Once upon a time in
Elder Days, everyone running
Unix had
source. After 1978,
AT&T's policy tightened up, so this
objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at
associates of some outfit with a Unix
source licence. In
practice, bootlegs of Unix
source code (made precisely for
reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that one could utter it
at almost anyone on
the network without concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones are becoming common enough that
almost anyone can read
source legally.
The most widely
distributed is probably
Linux.
FreeBSD,
NetBSD,
386BSD,
jolix also have their followers. Cheap commercial
Unix implementations with
source such as
BSD/OS from
BSDI
are accelerating this trend.
(1996-01-02)