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Comment by pyrotechnick | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have confused a few monkeys tapping on keyboards "collaboratively" for some kind of trustworthy source of definition.

Good thing Kenneth E. Knight introduced the notion bootlegging in 1967; well before the gnomes could ever get their filthy mitts near it.

Try not to let a few control-freaks on Wikipedia desecrate your language more than it already has. You owe them nothing.

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The official definition from Knight's seminal paper "A Descriptive Model of the Intra-Firm Innovation Process" [1]:

    "Bootlegging: In some instances the innovator may be able 
    to implement a new idea by keeping the development under 
    cover from the disapproving power in the organization 
    until it is introduced. At that time it may be impossible 
    for the organization to reverse itself."

It's reasonable to consider the authority of a Wikipedia entry, but in this case I believe the maintainers simply modernized "under cover" and "disapproving power".

1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2351630

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