Palantir Embraces Open Source

March 4, 2013

Palantir leaves its interesting legal past and affirms open-source goodness, we learn from Directions Magazine’s article, “Palantir: An Open Source Development Success Story.”

The tale begins with Gotham, an analytics platform with a nifty new geospatial component, in 2007. The product launched successfully, and Palantir looked to expand to different databases across a variety of industries. See the article for the details of their needs and their decision-making process; long story short, the company chose PostGIS as the springboard for their solution.

Yes, springboard. It took a lot of tinkering to make the software do just what they wanted, but the experience with the open source community was a positive one for the company. In fact, Palantir went on working with OpenGeo to develop more PostGIS enhancements that would benefit more than their own company. The article tells us:

“Gotham developers were happy to fund this open source development and were especially impressed with the network effects of community bug testing and further feature development. To them it seemed only fair that others would be able to benefit from their investment, since they had benefited so greatly from what was already built by others and would similarly benefit from what others built in the future. Their assumption has proved correct; since Palantir’s original investment, many users have funded or developed new functions and performance enhancements for geography calculations.”

If interested in the development of geospatial applications, the details in this article are worth checking out. Palantir was so happy with their open source experience that they have not only continued to support others’ open source projects, but have also opened some open source ventures of their own.

Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir Technologies focuses on improving the ways their client organizations analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some enterprising folks from PayPal and from Stanford University.

Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, News, Open source

Comments

One Response to “Palantir Embraces Open Source”

robertkenny on March 4th, 2013 2:33 am

RT @BeyondSearch: Palantir Embraces Open Source: http://t.co/fMhMfrprb6

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.