proprietary adj.
1. In marketroid-speak,
superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the
unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or software
designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior;
implies a product not conforming to open-systems standards, and
thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to
gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial
sale has locked the customer in. Often in the phrase "proprietary
crap". 3. Synonym for closed-source, e.g. software issued in
binary without source and under a restructive license.
Since the coining of the term open
source, many hackers have made a conscious effort to
distinguish between `proprietary' and `commercial' software. It
is possible for software to be commercial (that is, intended to
make a profit for the producers) without being proprietary. The
reverse is also possible, for example in binary-only
freeware.
Node:protocol, Next:provocative maintenance,
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protocol n.
As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the
proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the
order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place
setting; hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead
to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or
pieces of software to coordinate with each other without
ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the
proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in
which one should use the forks in the Dining Philosophers
Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and
an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties
involved understand, and that transactions among them follow
predictable logical sequences. See also handshaking, do protocol.
Node:provocative
maintenance, Next:prowler,
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provocative maintenance n.
[common ironic mutation of `preventive maintenance'] Actions
performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to
ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called
because it is all too often performed by a field servoid who doesn't know what he
is doing; such `maintenance' often induces problems, or
otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an
unusable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See
also scratch monkey.