CANONICAL RELEASES STORM AS OPEN SOURCE

LONDON, July 11, 2007 – 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.

"Storm is an ORM that simplifies the development of database-backed applications in Python, especially for projects that use very large databases or multiple databases with a seamless web front-end," said Gustavo Niemeyer, lead developer of Storm at Canonical. "Storm is particularly designed to feel very natural to Python programmers, and exposes multiple databases as stores in a clean and easy to use fashion."

The project has been in development for more than a year for use in Canonical projects such as Launchpad (http://launchpad.net), and is now publicly available under the LGPL license. This will be the first complete Launchpad component to be released as open source software.

"We're excited about using Storm for Launchpad, and that it is being released as open source. Storm's API is clear and well designed, making it a joy to work with," said Steve Alexander, Launchpad Product Manager at Canonical. "The scalability advantages of Storm's architecture are important for us to ensure that Launchpad continues to perform well as the number of Launchpad users grows."

Launchpad currently includes developers data for several thousand projects and is used by tens of
thousands of developers, translators, and other free software contributors. The Storm project welcomes participation, and has a new website at http://storm.canonical.com. That site includes a tutorial, and links to allow developers to download, report bugs and join the mailing list.

About Canonical and Ubuntu
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's global support team and partners.

Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.

Download Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com/download. To learn about commercial support for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, please see www.canonical.com/support. For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com.
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Contact: Bill Baker, Baker Communications Group, 860-350-9100, pr@canonical.com