“If you’ve been questioning whether open-source projects can
move beyond mimicry and ‘me-too’ products to create significant
innovation, you might want to take a long look at The Long Now
Foundation’s open-source Timeline/Calendar project. Conceived by
Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and others as a
server-based rendering engine for timeline visualizations, the
timeline software is flexible enough to be tailored for a wide
variety of projects, abstractions, and time scales.“Started by West Coast entrepreneurs–including parallel
computing pioneer Danny Hillis–The Long Now Foundation aims to get
people thinking slower and better rather than faster and cheaper.
‘In my work on parallel computers,’ Hillis said, ‘I met a lot of
people who were obsessed with speed. My customers were always
looking at ‘faster, faster.’ So I naturally began to think of
‘slower’ as the unnoticed frontier…'”