Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of
time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. *Real*
hackers (see toolsmith) generalize uninteresting problems
enough to make them interesting and solve them --- thus solving the
original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted,
occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into
a tectonic plate). See WOMBAT, SMOP; compare [toy
problem}, oppose interesting.
An example of UNIX brain damage is a kluge in a mail server to
recognize bare line feed (the UNIX newline) as an equivalent form
to the Internet standard newline, which is a carriage return
followed by a line feed. Such things can make even a hardened
jock weep.
In this view, UNIX was designed to be one of the first computer
viruses (see virus) --- but a virus spread to computers indirectly
by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and
networks. Adherents of this `UNIX virus' theory like to cite the
fact that the well-known quotation "UNIX is snake oil" was
uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began
actively promoting its own family of UNIX workstations. (Olsen now
claims to have been misquoted.)
The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes
of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers)
and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some
extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the
system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as
`real winners'.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker
may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not
hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who
uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who
uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap
between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by
context.
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 license. 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, with 386BSD (aka jolix) running second. Cheap
commercial UNIXes with source such as BSD/386 are accelerating this
trend.