The New Hacker's Dictionary

(alt. 'frowney face') See emoticon.

FRS // n.,obs.

Abbreviation for "Freely Redistributable Software" which entered general use on the Internet in 1995 after years of low-level confusion over what exactly to call software written to be passed around and shared (contending terms including freeware, shareware, and 'sourceware' were never universally felt to be satisfactory for various subtle reasons). The first formal conference on freely redistributable software was held in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in February 1996 (sponsored by the Free Software Foundation). The conference organizers used the FRS abbreviation heavily in its calls for papers and other literature during 1995. The term was in steady though not common use until 1998 and the invention of open source.

fry //

1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See fried, magic smoke.

2. vt. To cause to fail; to roach, toast, or hose a piece of hardware. Never used of software or humans, but compare fried.

fscking /fus'-king/ or /eff'-seek-ing/ adj.

[Usenet; common] Fucking, in the expletive sense (it refers to the Unix filesystem-repair command fsck(1), of which it can be said that if you have to use it at all you are having a bad day). Originated on scary devil monastery and the bofh.net newsgroups, but became much more widespread following the passage of CDA. Also occasionally seen in the variant "What the fsck?"

FSF /F-S-F/ abbrev.

Common abbreviation (both spoken and written) for the name of the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit educational association formed to support the GNU project.

FTP /F-T-P/, not /fit'ip/

1. [techspeak] n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet.

2. vt. To beam a file using the File Transfer Protocol.