Linus Torvalds, the author of Linux. Nobody in the hacker culture has been as
readily recognized by first name alone since Ken (Thompson).
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Linux /lee'nuhks/ or /li'nuks/, not
/li:'nuhks/ n.
The free Unix workalike created by Linus Torvalds and friends
starting about 1991. The pronunciation /lee'nuhks/ is preferred
because the name `Linus' has an /ee/ sound in Swedish (Linus's
family is part of Finland's 6% ethnic-Swedish minority). This may
be the most remarkable hacker project in history -- an entire
clone of Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for
free with sources over the net (ports to Alpha and Sparc and many
other machines are also in use).
Linux is what GNU aimed to be, and
it relies on the GNU toolset. But the Free Software Foundation
didn't produce the kernel to go with that toolset until 1999,
which was too late. Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and
NetBSD have been technically successful but never caught fire the
way Linux has; as this is written in 2000, Linux is seriously
challenging Microsoft's OS dominance. It has already captured 31%
of the Internet-server market and 25% of general business
servers.
An earlier version of this entry opined "The secret of Linux's
success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to
keep the development process open and recruit other hackers,
creating a snowball effect." Truer than we knew. See bazaar.
(Some people object that the name `Linux' should be used to
refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This
claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people
who insist on the term `GNU/Linux' want the the FSF to get most of the credit for Linux because
RMS and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this
theory nor the term `GNU/Linux' has gained more than minority
acceptance).
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lion food n.
[IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension,
administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two
lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their
chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet,
one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How
did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a
small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then
I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat
one replies: "Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a
manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"