The New Hacker's Dictionary

2. An acronym for 'Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other F-verbs may be substituted for 'flipping'.

Fred Foobar // n.

J. Random Hacker's cousin. Any typical human being, more or less synomous with 'someone' except that Fred Foobar can be backreferenced by name later on. "So Fred Foobar will enter his phone number into the database, and it'll be archived with the others. Months later, when Fred searches..." See also Bloggs Family and Dr. Fred Mbogo

frednet /fred'net/ n.

Used to refer to some random and uncommon protocol encountered on a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve the frednet problem."

free software // n.

As defined by Richard M. Stallman and used by the Free Software movement, this means software that gives users enough freedom to be used by the free software community. Specifically, users must be free to modify the software for their private use, and free to redistribute it either with or without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially, either gratis or charging a distribution fee. Free software has existed since the dawn of computing; Free Software as a movement began in 1984 with the GNU Project. See also open source.

freeware // n.

[common] Free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, Usenet, or other electronic media. At one time, 'freeware' was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See shareware, FRS.

freeze // v.

To lock an evolving software distribution or document against changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the strong implication that the item in question will 'unfreeze' at some future date. "OK, fix that bug and we'll freeze for release."

There are more specific constructions on this term. A 'feature freeze', for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new features but still allows bugfixes and completion of existing features; a 'code freeze' connotes no more changes at all. At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to 'code slush' -- that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state.