Someone Just Put the CIA's Favorite Software on GitHub for Free
- Rich Washburn
- May 13
- 5 min read
Let me tell you about a company you've probably never heard of — and why that's not an accident.
Palantir was founded in 2003. Two of its earliest backers were Peter Thiel and In-Q-Tel — which is the CIA's venture capital arm. Not a firm that does work adjacent to the intelligence community. The actual CIA's actual investment fund. So from day one, the CIA was writing checks to build this thing. And for its first three years, the CIA was Palantir's only customer. That tells you everything about what this company was built for and who it was built to serve.
What Palantir Actually Does
Here's the problem Palantir was designed to solve. Imagine you're a government agency — or a massive corporation — and you have data coming in from everywhere. Police records. Financial transactions. Satellite imagery. Social media. Border crossings. Surveillance systems. Medical records. Supply chain data. All of it stored in completely different systems, different formats, different databases that were never designed to talk to each other. Palantir connects all of it.
It takes data that lives in isolated silos and unifies it into a single operational layer — what they call an ontology — where instead of thinking about rows and columns in a database, you're thinking about people, places, events, and relationships. The data starts to look like the real world it represents. And then AI goes to work on top of that unified layer, finding patterns and connections that no human analyst would ever spot by looking at each data source alone.
The US military used Palantir in Afghanistan to predict where roadside bombs were going to be planted. They fed in historical data — where bombs had been placed before, what roads, what times, what patterns — and Palantir helped analysts model where the next one would likely appear. The FBI used it. The NSA used it. Immigration enforcement used it. Local police departments started buying predictive policing access. Morgan Stanley uses it. Airbus uses it. Hospitals used it during COVID to manage patient data across the entire country.
By 2024, Palantir was making $2.9 billion a year. Their stock went up over 500% in a single year. And in July 2025, the US Army consolidated 75 separate contracts into one $10 billion, decade-long deal giving Palantir access to every Army database in operation. That's the largest contract in the company's history. This is not a startup. This is infrastructure for governments and militaries at a scale that is almost hard to process.
What It Costs
Palantir doesn't publish pricing. That's intentional. Enterprise software that hides its price tag is enterprise software that costs so much they don't want to scare you off before the sales team gets on the phone. We're talking millions per year. Sometimes tens of millions. Occasionally hundreds of millions if you're a national government.
This is a tool that only governments, militaries, and Fortune 500 companies have ever been able to afford to even consider. The technology has been around for over 20 years. Most people have never heard the name.
That was by design too.
And Then Someone Put It on GitHub
A developer — going by DioCrafts — just built an open-source version of Palantir Foundry, the commercial enterprise platform, and released it for free on GitHub. It's called OpenFoundry.
Self-hosted. No subscription. No contract. No sales call. No 47-page enterprise agreement. You download it, you run it on your own machine or server, and you go.
Here's what it actually does under the hood: it's a Go monorepo of 41 microservices with a React frontend. Built around the same capability model as Palantir Foundry — datasets, ontology, pipelines, AI/ML, governance, observability. It has over 1,000 commits, a full architecture document, a ROADMAP, and it already has forks. This isn't a weekend demo project. This is a working system.
You can connect any data source — databases, spreadsheets, APIs, files — and pull everything into one unified place. You can build ontologies that map your data to real-world objects, entities, and relationships instead of treating it like rows in a table. You can create visual pipelines that clean and transform data automatically. You can build dashboards. And you can plug AI into the entire stack to start finding patterns you'd never spot manually. The core capability — the thing that Palantir spent 20 years and billions of dollars building a moat around — is now available as a free download.
What This Actually Means
Let me be honest about what this is and what it isn't. OpenFoundry is not going to replace the actual Palantir for the Pentagon. The real platform has decades of development, thousands of engineers, classified integrations, government security certifications, and custom-built pipelines for specific national security systems that took years to build. If you're the Army, you're not swapping your $10 billion contract for a GitHub repo. But that's not the point. That has never been the point with these releases.
The point is that the architecture — the fundamental approach to thinking about data, the ontology model, the way of connecting siloed systems into a unified operational layer — is now available to anyone with the technical ability to run it. Small businesses. Researchers. Journalists. Nonprofits. Developers. Entrepreneurs. People who have serious data problems and serious analytical needs but who could never in their lives afford an enterprise Palantir contract.
Think about what that unlocks.
You run a mid-sized business and your customer data is in your CRM, your sales data is in your ERP, your inventory is in a warehouse management system, and your finance team is working off spreadsheets that someone updates manually on Fridays. You've been trying to answer a question like which customers are most likely to churn and nobody can give you a clean answer because the data is in four different places that don't talk to each other. That's a Palantir-class problem. Now there's a Palantir-class tool that doesn't require a Palantir-class budget.
Or you're a researcher tracking a public health pattern across geographic data, demographic data, and social indicators. You need to connect datasets that were never designed to be connected and find correlations that only become visible when you look at everything at once. That's exactly what this platform was built for.
Or you're building a company in the data infrastructure or AI space, and you want to understand how one of the most sophisticated operational data platforms ever built actually works at the architecture level — the microservice design, the ontology kernel, the data pipeline patterns. Now you can read the code.
The Pattern That Keeps Appearing
This is the third or fourth time in the last two years we've seen this exact pattern play out... Something gets built behind closed doors — for governments, for intelligence agencies, for militaries, for Fortune 500 companies. It stays locked away, expensive, exclusive, guarded by classification and NDAs and enterprise contracts. And then someone, somewhere, cracks it open and puts it on GitHub.
The Wi-Fi radar that sees through walls. The AI hedge fund trading system. The autonomous vehicle perception stack. And now this — an open-source operational data platform built on the same architecture as a system the CIA funded from day one.
Every time it happens, a capability that was reserved for the powerful few becomes available to everyone. That's not a small thing. That's a fundamental redistribution of technological leverage — and it keeps accelerating.
Palantir spent over 20 years building a moat. Classified integrations. Government relationships. Security clearances. A business model engineered to make replication essentially impossible without billions of dollars and decades of access.
A developer on GitHub just opened a door in that wall.
link to OpenFoundry: github.com/DioCrafts/OpenFoundry
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