It's a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business. The key is developing a web-driven community where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. Since 1998 Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel have been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around open source projects. In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla.
* Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity Award for General Books
* Describes how open source development works and offers persuasive reasons for using it to help achieve business goals.
* Shows how to use open source in day-to-day work, discusses the various licenses in use, and describes what makes for a successful project.
* Written in an engaging style for executives, managers, and engineers that addresses the human and business issues involved in open source development as well as its history, philosophy, and future

New poetry from computer scientist Richard P. Gabriel.

This final report of the Stanford Lisp Performance Study, conducted over a three year period by the author, describes implementation techniques, performance tradeoffs, benchmarking techniques, and performance results for all of the major Lisp dialects in use today. A popular highlevel programming language used predominantly in artificial intelligence, Lisp was the first language to concentrate on working with symbols instead of numbers. Lisp was introduced by John McCarthy in the early 1960s (McCarthy's LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual published in 1962 is available in paperback from The MIT Press) and its continuous development has enabled it to remain dominant in artificial intelligence.Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems is the first book to present descriptions on the Lisp implementation techniques actually in use and can serve as a handbook to the implementation details of all of the various current Lisp expressions. It provides detailed performance information using the tools of benchmarking (the process of utilizing standardized computer programs to test the processing power of different computer systems) to measure the various Lisp systems, and provides an understanding of the technical tradeoffs made during the implementation of a Lisp system.The study is divided into three major parts. The first provides the theoretical background, outlining the factors that go into evaluating the performance of a Lisp system. The second part presents the Lisp implementations: MacLisp, MIT CADR, LMI Lambda, S-I Lisp, Franz Lisp, MIL, Spice Lisp, Vax Common Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp, and Xerox D-Machine. A final part describes the benchmark suite that was used during the major portion of the study and the results themselves.Richard P. Gabriel is President and Chief Technical Officer, Lucid, Inc., and Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University. Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems is included in the Computer Systems series, Research Reports and Notes, edited by Herb Schwetman.