Wasn't this how Django was born? A news agency needed a CMS and django was built.
[1]: http://www.documentcloud.org/about [2]: http://www.documentcloud.org/opensource
We'll see how it pans out, but I for one would love for Armstrong to integrate with the DocumentCloud API, in order to provide seamless document management, OCR, search, and annotation for the primary source docs behind Armstrong articles. I've been talking to Travis about it -- perhaps it's a bit of code we can contribute to the project.
Other recent Knight-funded open source includes the excellent TileMill project:
http://mapbox.github.com/tilemill/
... which, in another bit of cooperation, uses Backbone.js for its editing interface: http://developmentseed.github.com/TileMill/docs/tilemill.htm...