[Unix] On-line acronym for ‘Use the Source, Luke’ (a pun
on Obi-Wan Kenobi's “Use the Force, Luke!” in Star
Wars) — analogous to RTFS (sense
1), but more polite. 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 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 have become widely enough distributed that
anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly
Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second.
Cheap commercial Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this
trend.
