Canonical Ltd today announced the release of Storm, a generic open source object relational mapper (ORM) for Python. Storm is designed to support communication with multiple databases simultaneously. Canonical is best known for the popular Ubuntu operating system and Launchpad, a web-based collaboration platform for open source developers.

London July 21, 2009: Canonical, the founder of the Ubuntu project, announced today that it has open-sourced the code that runs Launchpad, the software development and collaboration platform used by tens of thousands of developers.

Launchpad is used to build Ubuntu and thousands of other projects, and its users can now participate directly in the development of Launchpad itself.

The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive, has said AGPL is "a strong candidate" for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical's developer collaboration tool.

How many open source relational databases can you name? If you’re like most technical people, you probably don’t know any — just as I didn’t until recently. I can already imagine many of you saying... what about MySQL and PostgreSQL?”, but those are just databases, not relational databases.

To this point...Launchpad isn't available under a free software license aside from its Storm component. However, Mark Shuttleworth has stated this afternoon that within the next 12 months they expect to release the source-code to Launchpad.

Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that the Canonical Identity Provider code is now available as open source

Launchpad is a suite of tools that help people and teams to work together on free software. It is hosted at Launchpad.net by Canonical, Ltd, and [now] it is open source itself, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Canonical's most famous project is Ubuntu.  But Launchpad, another of the company's major endeavors, has been around just as long - even though many casual Ubuntu users may not be aware of its existence.  Here's a look at the value Launchpad offers, and where it fits into Canonical's present and future.

Red Hat announced today that it has settled a patent dispute with Firestar and DataTern over two patents, including one that covers object-relational database mapping—a technique that is used in Hibernate, a component of the JBoss middleware stack.