Crossword-Solution: APPS 4 letters, 306 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps.

Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes.

Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU stuff.

Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers -- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary.

Without the legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new market),Killer apps don't have to be proprietary.