Yahoo intends to start running the cloud-serving engine in production before the end of March. The timeline for releasing the software as open source isn't set, but Papaioannou is hoping for this year. "The simple answer is I'd like to prove that it works in production, with heavy traffic running across it," before releasing as open source, he says.

Papaioannou, who joined Yahoo in May 2010, says the project started development last year and is in alpha stage now.

Yahoo, known for its contributions to Hadoop, typically uses the Apache license in open-source projects, Papaioannou says.

The cloud-serving engine is written in Java and C++, and will support PHP and JavaScript. Once open-sourced, users could adopt other languages, such as Python, although 's . "might be tricky" because the cloud-serving platform is based around the LAMP and Java stack. Before releasing as open source, Yahoo will strip out some components that are specific to Yahoo and therefore wouldn't help outside users.

"We believe there is a huge benefit to open-sourcing our infrastructure, allowing other people to augment it and make it better," Papaioannou says. "That's what's made the Internet successful to date."