"Some open source tech is literally, out of this world.
"Back in 1998, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began an
effort to create a framework for data sharing called
Object-Oriented Data Technology (OODT). In January 2010, OODT
became an Apache Incubator project and now in 2011, it has
officially graduated to become a top level open source Apache
Software Foundation project.
"Apache describes the OODT project as middleware for metadata.
The effort has the potential to benefit many industries beyond the
confines of NASA JPL."
