I’ll never forget Larry Garfield’s first day at Palantir, just over a decade ago. We were using Windows workstations at the time, but Larry brought a Knoppix CD into the office so that he could run Linux on his computer instead. Larry later followed the rest of the office when we switched to Macs, but with reluctance and much grumbling.

Since that time, Palantir has moved offices three times and grown to a company of over thirty people distributed around the country. Instead of acting primarily as a development shop, we now provide a full array of strategy, design, development, and support services tailored to the needs of our diverse client base.

Much of this growth and success has been fueled by our embrace of open source technologies, like Drupal, that have enabled us to create and collaborate in an open environment and provided the flexibility that helps us and our customers make the right choices.

Anyone who knows Larry knows that he’s always been a passionate advocate for software freedom. As someone who was involved in the Drupal project even before Palantir started working with it, he helped introduce us to its community as we made the transition to becoming a truly open source company. He played key roles in the development of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, and in recent years, he’s focused on helping different open source communities share knowledge and work together toward building standards and best practices for the open web.

At Palantir, Larry’s technical leadership has helped elevate the work of our technical team and helped us build a robust and sustainable development process designed to evolve along with the ever-changing needs of our customers.

After more than ten years as part of the Palantir team, Larry is leaving the agency world to tackle new challenges. We very much appreciate the time he spent with us at Palantir, and while his presence will certainly be missed, we are also very excited to see how he applies his skills and knowledge to help improve open source software development for people everywhere.