This came out of a practical problem: at Spotify, Andreas couldn't let any data leave their network. He wasn't going to go through procurement to buy an enterprise version of one of those products, so his only option left was open source software.

But it's also out of principle: we think such a foundational thing needs to be open source. There is a reason most people use Git and not Perforce.

Replicate can work alongside visualization tools -- your data is safe in your own S3 bucket, but you can use the hosted visualization tool to complement that.

You could also imagine visualization tools built on top of Replicate. One thing we've been thinking about is doing visualization inside notebooks. It's like a programmable Tensorboard: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/18sVRE4Zi484G2rBeOYj...

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about that. It's pretty primitive so far, but we've got to start somewhere I suppose. :)