Being a daily user of Foundry, I really see Foundry as a scalable implementation of the SemanticWeb / LinkedData principles.

Not to go [again] in the technical debate, I will summarise their stack: they use Spark as their foundation, with a simple pattern of materialisationAsTables when needed, possible synchronisation to RDBMS or to a graph database with a strong ontological layer on top.

They then provide a web app stack and a low code/noCode dev environment. [there are other components in the platform, but let’s keep it simple].

So no IT rocket science here, but the UX mostly hides all the IT bricks under a pure data oriented workflow. [very few of my colleagues know what python, spark, AWS are].

Three comments on this: could anyone rebuild such a platform? Yes. Is it worth it? Most companies will say no. Do SAP analytics tools compete? Time will tell.

Really in Foundry the scalability is MASSIVE ! [but keep in mind that this is an analytics platform, not a write-oriented platform]

Now let’s switch to the political side of [the company called] Palantir:

Can such a platform be used by Santa Claus to monitor the data for the next Christmas? yes

Can someone decide to aggregate all the data of all the citizens and hope to do mass control with that? Probably [but hey, Facebook/Netflix/TikTok are already doing that, plus they are actively hacking your *brain*, and no one complains]

> and no one complains

You lost me at this point. The comment was insightful up until the whataboutism and "no one complains". Lmao.