Ten days into July, Canonical, the company which is best known for the Ubuntu Linux distribution, released the source code for one component of Launchpad - a system that serves as a single repository for revision control.
Storm, the component for which source was released, is an object-relational mapping tool for the Python programming language; it can support a number of communication channels with multiple databases. To make it a bit simpler, it helps a developer to map objects to relational databases; hence it is possible to work with different database types using one programming language.
This would not be news were it not for the fact that there is an interesting tale surrounding Launchpad.