Development testing service Coverity’s annual scan report, which is based on data from almost 500 software projects with a total of over 450 million lines of code, says that almost 230,000 defects were found and fixed. And while the average defect density per thousand lines of code was almost identical between open source and proprietary, there was an interesting diversion in the results.

Open source projects, Coverity says, tend to have .69 bugs per thousand lines of code, virtually the same as proprietary software, which tends to have .68 errors per thousand lines. But large closed-source projects — over one million lines of code — tend to have 33 percent fewer errors than small closed-source projects, with .66 errors over each thousand lines of larger projects compared to .98 in smaller projects. And small open source projects have a massive 70 percent fewer errors than large open source software, with only .44 defects compared to .75.

The difference, according to Coverity, is that small open source projects are labors of love by individual developers or small teams, who carefully comb through their code to reduce errors. Large open source projects, on the other hand, tend to lack standardized processes to ensure code quality, and so the error rate increases.

In commercial or closed-source software, developers experience almost the opposite conditions. Large projects tend to have well-defined formal testing processes, which ensure higher code quality, and small projects tend to be hasty, quick endeavors that show the effects of growing pains, as no standardized testing is in place.

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

All of the data in infographic form:

photo credit: gui.tavares via photopin cc

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Pioneering open-source solution vendor Red Hat (RHT) announced today that its board has authorized a $300 million stock buyback program.

The new program replaces a previous $300 million buyback program, the final $179 million of which the company completed in February, at an average price of $49.15 per share. The new program will enable management to use its discretion to purchase Red Hat stock from time to time, as it judges market conditions to be favorable, until it has gone through the entire $300 million allocation.

The previous program allowed Red Hat to repurchase about 3 percent of its outstanding stock. The $300 million allocation is just 23 percent of the company’s cash stockpile of $1.3 billion.

Repurchasing stock is one way companies use to get rid of excess cash while bolstering their stock price (by reducing the number of shares outstanding), while securing additional shares for future (as employee options or stock grants, or for a possible secondary stock offering in the future). It’s also a strong signal that the company’s board believes that its stock has a good, upward trajectory in its future.

Photo: Do you know how hard it is to find an image to illustrate Red Hat? Instead, please enjoy this photo of an adorable old lady wearing a red hat. Credit: Ross Berteig/Flickr

Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

Called What Can I Do For Mozilla, the site lets you choose from a few web languages — JavaScript, C, Java, PHP, and Python, to name a few — then directs you to the Mozilla projects needing contributors with those skills.

Most languages have multiple related projects for would-be contributors to consider, and each end option links to the project page.

Check ‘er out:

Basically, we all know that open-source software is a good thing, and we all know that good people give back to the communities from which they themselves take inspiration and tools. This site just makes it really easy to start following through on those values.

The site was created by University of Waterloo computer science student Josh Matthews. Matthews himself has contributed to a fair number of open-source projects, from Greasemonkey scripts and C IDEs to Firefox mods and JRuby.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Rob Isaac is a New Zealand-based developer, technical analyst, and consultant. After the news that Google would be creating its own, Chrome-specific version of the Webkit browser rendering engine, called Blink, Isaac created this “translation” of Google’s developer FAQ for Blink. This FAQ was originally published on his website.

1 Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine?

The WebKit maintainers wouldn’t let us attack Apple directly, by changing WebKit in ways that would make it perform badly on OS X and iOS.

Because they share a rendering engine, developer effort to ensure Chrome compatibility currently benefits Apple platforms for free. To prevent this, we must make Chrome and WebKit behave differently.

1.1 What sorts of things should I expect from Chrome?

Nothing yet. This is a political move, not a technical one.

However, while the Chrome user interface will not change in any significant way, we will be silently overwriting all existing installations of Chrome with our new rendering engine without your knowledge or consent.

1.2 Is this new browser engine going to fragment the web platform’s compatibility more?

Yes.

We intend to distract people from this obvious problem by continually implying that our as-yet unwritten replacement is somehow much better and more sophisticated than the rendering engine that until yesterday was more than good enough to permit us to achieve total dominance of the Windows desktop browsing market in less than two years.

This strategy has worked extremely well for Netscape, Microsoft, Apple and us in previous iterations of the browser wars, and we firmly believe that everyone in this industry was born yesterday and they will not recognise this for the total bullshit it so clearly is.

1.3 Hold up, isn’t more browsers sharing WebKit better for compatibility?

Yes. See 1.

1.4 How does this affect web standards?

We have sufficient market share on the desktop that a few months from now, we will be in a position to unilaterally dictate them.

We hope to leverage this control to achieve the same dominance in mobile eventually.

1.5 Will we see a -chrome vendor prefix now?

No. See 1.4.

1.6 So we have an even more fragmented mobile WebKit story?

Yes.

We encourage you to adopt Chrome on Android for your mobile browsing needs.

1.7 What’s stopping Chrome from shipping proprietary features?

Nothing.

1.8 Is this just a ruse to land the Dart VM or Native Client?

We’ve decided to avoid discussing unpopular topics like those for the time being.

1.9 What should we expect to see from Chrome and Blink in the next 12 months? What about the long term?

We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

1.10 Is this going to be open source?

Not really.

While you can certainly read the source code, we’re fully aware that actually tracking and understanding a modern HTML renderer is extremely difficult. In addition, the first changes we will make are intended specifically to break compatibility with WebKit, so the only organisation with sufficient resources to track our changes will no longer be able to do so.

In practice, this allows us to call the project “open” while simultaneously ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink source now and in the future. We’ve had enormous success co-opting the language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we aim to continue with that strategy.

1.11 Opera recently announced they adopted Chromium for their browsers. What’s their plan?

Opera have such a tiny market share that they have no choice other than to follow whatever strategy Chromium adopts. In this case, it means they will adopt the Blink renderer as quickly as possible.

1.12 Why is this is good for me as a web developer?

It isn’t. Our primary goal is to use your development efforts as leverage against our competitors. See 1.9.

photo credit: nitot via photopin cc

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At least, on a whopping ten patents.

Google says it is “committed to promoting innovation” and that therefore, it is “pledging the free use of certain of its patents” used in both software and hardware products. Open systems eventually win, Google says, but open platforms like Android have faced increasing levels of attack via what Google calls “bogus patents” in the hands of Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle. Therefore, to protect innovation and everyone’s ability to deliver great products and services, Google says, it’s announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge.

But don’t take that to mean that Apple is now in the clear.

The ten lonely patents Google is starting with are not mobile patents, they aren’t focused on Android, and are therefore not in the most litigious arena of the current era which has seen Apple and Google proxy Samsung pitted in numerous patent infringement cases across the globe: smartphones. Don’t forget that Google-owned Motorola sued Apple with its 17,000-strong patent portfolio just last year in an attempt to ban the import of pretty much Apple’s entire product line: iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

Oh, and one more massive caveat? The project or product using Google’s patented technologies must be open source. Good luck with that one, Apple and Microsoft.

Still, it’s a start. And it’s a noble endeavor.

But it’s interesting, even odd, that Google chose to cite the Android-under-attack example, because right now, given the patents that Google has added to the pledge, what this is really about is open source software projects like Linux or Apache. The ten patents Google is pledging are all about data management, data analysis, and data processing. Which means that technologies like Hadoop (an open source technology for processing large amounts of data across multiple distributed servers) which will not now have to worry about stepping on Google’s patented toes when building in new capabilities.

And that’s all good and excellent.

But it’s not going to do anything for Android or to create patent peace between warring competitors like Apple and Samsung, or Apple and Google for that matter. To do that, the pledge would need to be broadened to closed-source products and tailored a little to be more comfortable to for-profit enterprises.

This is at least a start, and Google will add more patents to the pool over time.

But it’s also probably reflective of an internal Google ethos that not only believes that open systems win, but that in a world where open systems increasingly dominate, Google wins.

Here’s Google’s open patent non-assertion pledge:

Google promises to each person or entity that develops, distributes or uses Free or Open Source Software (a “Pledge Recipient”) that Google will not bring a lawsuit or other legal proceeding against a Pledge Recipient for patent infringement under any Pledged Patents based on the Pledge Recipient’s (i) development, manufacture, use, sale, offer for sale, lease, license, exportation, importation or distribution of any Free or Open Source Software, or (ii) internal-only use of Free or Open Software, either as obtained by Pledge Recipient or as modified by Pledge Recipient, in standalone form or combined with hardware or with any other software (“Internal-Only Use”). The preceding Pledge does not apply to any infringement of the Pledged Patents by hardware or by software that is not Free or Open Source Software, or by Free or Open Source Software combined with special purpose hardware or with software that is not Free or Open Source Software (except Internal-Only Use).

It is Google’s intent that the Pledge be legally binding, irrevocable (except as otherwise provided under “Defensive Termination” below) and enforceable against Google and entities controlled by Google, and their successors and assigns. Thus, Google will require any person or entity to whom it sells or transfers any of the Pledged Patents to agree, in writing, to abide by the Pledge and to place a similar requirement on any subsequent transferees to do the same.

The Pledge is not an assurance that any of the Pledged Patents cover any particular software or hardware or are enforceable, that the Pledged Patents are all patents that do or may cover any particular Free or Open Source Software, that any activities covered by the Pledge will not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of a third party, or that Google will add any other patents to the list of Pledged Patents. Except as expressly stated in the Pledge, no other rights are waived or granted by Google or received by a Pledge Recipient, whether by implication, estoppel, or otherwise.

photo credit: Cre8iveDoodles ~ Has been ill…Back Soon! via photopin cc

Microsoft has open-sourced some of the code for Kinect for Windows, its motion-sensing gestural control device for the desktop.

A total of 22 code samples have been posted to CodePlex, aka “Not GitHub.” Baby steps, baby steps!

Samples are available in C++, VisualBasic, and C# and include such elements as face tracking, depth of field, and audio capture/speech controls. Interested developers will need to download VisualStudio, .NET, and the Kinect for Windows SDK before getting started.

As Microsoftie Ben Lower wrote on the company blog, the whole goal of open-sourcing some of its most interesting technology is for the company to get feedback and rapidly improve on a game-changing device and accompanying software.

All the code samples are released under an Apache 2.0 license and are free for you to take, reuse, or remix. “Also, we’re using a Git repository so it’s easy clone & fork if you want,” Lower said.

In its preparation for Kinect-controlled Windows apps, Microsoft also recently released guidelines for gestural controls — a sort of white paper for app makers who are doing gestures for the first time and need standards, guidance, and expectations for users’ needs and wants.

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But it’s also not often that someone invents an open-source game development platform that can make Minecraft-style games that will, with a little luck, soon be running on web browsers everywhere: laptops, Android phones, and iPhones.

Twenty-two days ago, Max Ogden was a bored developer whose latest startup, Gather, was not, shall we say, making a lot of hay. So he was looking for something new to occupy his time.

“I came back from Europe in the winter working on a bunch of little indoor projects — it’s been freezing here in the Bay area,” Ogden told me today. “Then I saw the Minecraft documentary right after Christmas.”

He had given the wildly popular sandbox builder to his 10- and 11-year-old nephews for Christmas, and they loved it, so he started to think about building something for it — a mod perhaps, or an extension of Minecraft. And was startled to find that Minecraft was totally closed source, with no API (though one is coming soon). Instead, he discovered that developers who want to mod Minecraft hack it, decompile the code, build their mods, and then release them … to be broken with every new version of the game.

A forest in Voxel.

So he came up with the idea of building not just Minecraft, but the toolset to build any Minecraft-like game, all inside the browser, using common old Javascript and OpenGL, an industry-standard toolkit for building interactive 2-D and 3-D applications.

“OpenGL has been around for a long time, but Chrome became the first browser just last month that lets you take over someone’s mouse pointer, which is totally needed for games,” Ogden said.

Having found his project, Ogden did nothing else for the past three weeks, staying up late, “going crazy,” and cranking out code. He found numerous little snippets of code that others had worked on that helped, speeding the process, and brought in a friend, James Halliday, to help solve some particularly tough problems.

“In about two days of working with James, it all came together,” Ogden said. “We had something that looked like a game, and we looked at each other and said: ‘Holy cow, that was quick.’”

The result that looked like a game was Voxel.js. It’s not precisely a game itself, but a game-building toolkit for modern browsers. You can try early examples of game environments built with it already, right in your (Chrome) browser, including one with a virtual drone simulator.

A Minecraft skin

“Kyle Robinson, who runs hackathons for AR quadricopter drones, built a virtual drone simulator for it,” Odgen told me, marveling. “It has a command line, you can tell it to take off, spin, and it has a little camera to ‘see’ the terrain that shows up like an iPad in the game.”

Which is all very meta: watching a landscape of a virtual world via a virtual drone that you control in a game running inside a browser on your computer. It sounds impressive, until you hear that another acquaintance of Odgen is planning to run Voxel.js on a Raspberry Pi running Firefox OS (coming soon) on a real AR quadricopter videoing the actual landscape while also running the game and viewing a virtual landscape.

Just try to wrap your head around that.

All the code is open source, and Odgen is welcoming any and all hackers to make contributions, adding modules like water, better physics, or creatures. Seven already have. All of which could soon have the game-building environment running on iPhones as well as Android smartphones. While Android should be relatively easy as soon as Google updates mobile Chrome to support OpenGL more fully, iOS is another story. It turns out that Apple supports OpenGL in mobile Safari, but for iAds only.

“So you can run WebGL on iPhone … if you make your own browser,” he said.

Fortunately, a project named Impact is working on a solution, rendering Javascript to iOS’s native Objective-C language.

All of which means that a Minecraft-like game built with Voxel.js could conceivably run in a browser on an iPhone. And on an Android smartphone. And in your web browser on your laptop. And, if you really, really, really must, on a tiny little $35 Raspberry Pi, flying high on a quadricopter above the drunken old ladies of Oakland.

Which, frankly, would be awesome.

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I asked Georg Greve, a former physicist and nanotechnologist, exactly that question.

“There are three pillars of productivity for modern knowledge workers,” Greve replied. “One is the browser, the second is office applications, and the third is groupware. Free software has tackled the first two very well … but on the groupware side, almost nothing has happened.”

Greve is the CEO of Kolab Systems, which produces Kolab groupware, an enterprise-scale email, calendaring, contact management, and task management suite that is fully open-source, freely available, and interoperable with multiple web, desktop, and tablet clients. The company’s clients include Fortune 500 companies — which Greve cannot contractually name — who have 60,000 employees using Kolab, as well as the entire school system of Bazel, Switzerland, and the German Federal Office for Information Security.

In fact, that’s where the solution originated: an open source German government software project initiated in 2001.

Source: Kolab

Kolab works on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

“They needed a fully audit able, fully open-source solution that was designed around security awareness,” Greve said from Switzerland, where he lives and works. “But they couldn’t find anything.”

So they built one — or at least the foundations of what would become a full groupware solution. Most solutions, Greve says, come to the enterprise with “freedom stripped.” Kolab comes free not just in the standard beer sense — free to use — but also in the speech sense: free to alter, modify, and adapt.

Greve joined as CEO in 2010 when it became clear that the companies who had contracted with the German government to provide the solution needed focused attention on Kolab. Version 3, with an almost entirely refactored codebase, a completely new storage layer, and 100 percent open standards, is being released in January.

“We’re using IMAP as the database, which means we get insane scalability,” Georg said, adding that the company had partnered with Opera to get the project completed. “We’ve also built in full mobile connectivity … all the cloudy stuff … and added support for a whole range of native platforms: Mozilla Thunderbird, Lightning, Outlook … on Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

The data format is xCal and xCard, and enterprise clients can interact with the data via an open API, integrating their groupware solution into any other solution or even creating their own administration clients.

Kolab is bootstrapped with a little cash from Greve, other executives, and others and has a subscription revenue model similar to RedHat: training, certification, service level agreements, prioritized updates and fixes, and support.

It was to provide that third pillar of productivity that Georg joined Kolab from the Free Software Foundation of Europe. OpenOffice and Firefox area available for the other two; The Gimp, WordPress, and of course Linux itself, plus many other open source projects, provide options in other areas. But groupware was a bit of a green field.

Of course, it was also to fulfill an unusual long-time dream for the open-source believer:

“I had always wanted to go into business.”

photo credit: AGoK via photopin cc

In a recent blog post the lords of the universe over at code-hosting community GitHub laid out the biggest new open-source projects of 2012.

The GitHubbers track notability of OSS projects in a couple ways. First, they look at the number or “stars” a project has — that is, how many people find the project interesting enough to keep tabs on in a passive sense.

Second, GitHub also keeps track of how many active contributors a project has.

The company’s record-keeping for 2012 tallies up the number of new-this-year OSS projects with the most stars and the number of contributors that 2012 brought to all OSS projects, regardless of when they were started.

Without further ado, we give you — the 2012 Hubbies!*

First up, the new-in-2012 rising stars:

And here are the projects that racked up the greatest numbers of unique contributors in 2012:

*This is a disgusting term of our own devising. GitHub is not to be held responsible.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos really likes metaphors, and when you’re talking about something as complex as cloud-based app platforms, they seriously come in handy.

While talking onstage at CloudBeat 2011, Mickos compared Eucalyptus’ open-source cloud software platform to an espresso machine because it gives clients the tools to make their coffee (in this case, cloud software) at home. He said a company like Amazon, however, provides the cloud in a much more commercialized fashion like Starbucks provides coffee.

“We make the best espresso machines,” Mickos said. “We give you the power of the cloud on your own servers. We love Amazon and we support their API, but if another big API comes along, we will support that as well.”

When it comes to differentiation, Eucalyptus’ open-source nature separates itself from competitor VMWare, which does well with its closed approach to virtualization.

“We have a different mindset than the others,” Mickos said. “It’s hard to challenge the closed-source companies, but we do with a strong business-model.”

Mickos also talked about how companies, generally speaking, are adopting cloud services. He said that conservative companies shouldn’t take the plunge to the cloud just yet because standards are still being figured out. However, he noted that some “old-fashioned” organizations are adopting the cloud.

“The cloud is for early movers, but sometimes those organizations can be seen as old-fashioned,” Mickos said. “The U.S.D.A., for example, uses a Eucalyptus cloud to help and connect farmers. And other government agencies are going for it as well.”

Sources close to the matter tell us the trial, which was previously scheduled to begin on October 31, had to be put off because of the judge’s full schedule, which includes a particularly thorny gang trial.

Also, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is still in the process of reexamining the patents and claims in question.

While many of us do not imagine the lawsuit will actually end in a trial but rather, as many corporate disputes do, in a settlement, the judge in the case had already ordered three mediation hearings. A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat today that all of those hearings have already taken place, and, as he said, “Nothing was settled.”

Google has been shown to be open to the idea of settling out of court. However, the search-focused company may actually be at some degree of fault — the operative word being “may.” And if Oracle can wrest prohibitive licensing fees out of Android sales, it might make a significant dent in the OS’s profit margins.

We asked our Google source whether the Android operating system itself was in danger of, at worst, coming to a premature close, as many consumers have worried throughout the initial findings of this lawsuit.

“Absolutely not. There’s no indication that Android is under threat,” said the Googler.

“From a consumer standpoint, consumers should not be concerned about losing their Android phone. But they should be concerned with the way in which Oracle is taking a platform they supported for years [the Java programming language] and is now trying to capitalize on our success.”

Oracle has owned and maintained the open-source Java language since its acquisition of former Java owner Sun two years ago. However, Android is also Java-based and has roundly crushed the Oracle-owned Java ME mobile OS. As you can imagine, that hasn’t gone over too well with Oracle, and the resulting lawsuit has raised massive questions about how intellectual property law comes into play when open-source software is on the line.

“We’re actively pushing back on Oracle to preserve choice in the marketplace in the long term,” said the Google rep, who repeated Google’s well-known intentions about keeping the Android operating system open-source.

Related articles

• Google’s patent plot thickens with new Microsoft lawsuit against Motorola Mobility (venturebeat.com)
• Google ups its Android patent defense with Motorola purchase (venturebeat.com)
• Sun Was Close to Licensing Java Patents to Google for $28M (pcworld.com)
• Oracle v Google: Ellison, Schmidt, and Page to take witness stand over Android (guardian.co.uk)

Sitting across from Facebook’s senior open programs manager David Recordon at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, we asked the young open-source expert if working on open source software at a proprietary software company presented him with any ethical dilemmas.

“Absolutely not,” he responded. “Look at the amount of open-source software that we do release. We release far more of our infrastructure that we develop than any other company like us.

“And it’s hard. It requires effort to take software for your own environment and make it something that’s useful to others, too. Making a healthy project and accepting contributions takes time and focus.”

The social media company has, without question, taken the time to work on those projects. The hackers at Facebook have done perhaps more than any other single entity to advance and optimize PHP, the programming language on which the network is primarily built.

Facebook’s OSS projects

Recordon can rattle off any number of important OSS projects released by Facebook during his two-year tenure at the company. Before he joined Facebook, Recordon was a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to improving the way identities and logins are managed around the web.

Now, Recordon is building the team at Facebook that focuses on OSS and web standards, which includes technologies such as HTML5 and Oauth. He oversees both bringing in and pushing out worthy open-source projects to the company’s engineers and the larger community.

Some of those projects include Phabricator, a suite of web apps for code review and how Facebook does their own development; Cassandra, an open source distributed database management system; the waves-making HipHop, which transforms source code from PHP to C++; the company’s Javascript optimization efforts, called Primer; XHP, a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions; and Thrift, a software framework for scalable cross-language services development, to name but a few.

More remarkable still, all of these diverse and useful projects have come from a relatively small business over the course of less than four years. This is what Facebook engineers are doing in their spare time, folks.

“We value moving fast,” Recordon said. “The rate at which we build infrastructure and make changes, I haven’t seen anything like it. That’s core to our culture.”

Facebook’s hacker culture

Recordon describes the company’s expectations of engineers as “very entrepreneurial. We value the impact a single person or a small team can have. Video calling was built by one engineer and one designer. The messenger app was done by a few engineers. Those groups have a huge impact.”

While Facebook is out looking for those smart, motivated engineers to hack within the company independently or in small groups, hackers themselves are attracted to exactly that kind of opportunity — and working on open-source projects can be a huge selling point in Facebook’s recruitment process.

“Engineers enjoy working on open source,” Recordon said. “Culturally, it allows engineers to talk about what they’re working on publicly. Open-source software also allows people to see the kind of infrastructure we build. It gets people in some areas a taste of the code we’re running in production.”

In addition to working on in-house OSS projects, Facebook engineers are frequently core contributors to other open-source projects, such as Hadoop and Hive. “But those are tools [the data infrastructure team] uses to get their job done,” said Recordon.

Facebook’s OSS workflow

In a hacker-centeric culture that values independent work, how does Facebook, the organization, decide which projects get institutional support and which also get open-sourced? We asked Recordon what the process was like for HipHop.

“HipHop started three years ago, when the site was going through a tremendous growth curve,” Recordon told us. “We needed to optimize the PHP behind the site, and there were three competing projects at the time trying to do that. One was looking at tweaks around PHP itself. Another was working on a Java runtime for PHP, and then there was HipHop. On the risk/reward scale, HipHop was high risk, high reward. As one or two engineers were working on these things, it became clear that HipHop was the right solution, but there was a lot of testing and comparing… Test it, iterate, and code wins. We look at these projects logically.”

Of course, a company built by engineers would place logic at the forefront of every decision, even the decision on whether or not a piece of software should be made publicly available and shareable.

“Companies can see those pieces [of software] as far more core to their business,” said Recordon. “But our ability to serve PHP faster is not core to our business. But cheaper/faster development tools for other companies is a real competitive advantage.” Hence, logic dictates that because there’s no business loss if Facebook’s infrastructure is open-sourced, then open-sourced it should be.

The future of open source

But there’s more to open-source at Facebook than just its back-end software and PHP optimizations; with the Open Compute Project, Facebook is also trying to open-source its server and data center design, and it’s also thinking about what open-source means for data and APIs.

“I think it’s pretty clear there’s no question about whether companies should be using open-source software or not,” said Recordon. “That was answered over the past decade. The question now is about open hardware. Many of the things that we have today for OSS we don’t have for hardware and standards.

“The world continues to shift from open source being just about the code of the software to the APIs and data above it to the hardware below it.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Warning: Some of what follows is a bit convoluted — business disputes are rarely cut-and-dried, particularly once lawyers get involved. But it’s an interesting and important story, not least because the electronic medical-records system at the heart of the controversy, known as VistA, could offer one way out of the economic and technological morass into which the U.S. healthcare system continues to sink.

Medsphere is best-known as one of the early open-source developers of VistA, an electronic health-record system originally produced by the Veterans Administration. VistA has virtually nothing in common with the “personal health records” touted by the likes of Microsoft and Google these days (see my reviews here and here), which allow individuals to add — and presumably delete or change — medical info in a digitized health record. VistA, by contrast, is an electronic records system intended for use in hospitals and clinics that integrates and systematizes medical care, reducing physician errors and forcing specialists to coordinate their care. VistA is often cited as a major reason quality of medical care and patient satisfaction have soared at the VA in recent years (see, for instance, here.) The public-domain VistA is also in use at several other state and federal agencies and overseas.

Early on, Medsphere was committed to open-source development of VistA. Eventually, however, the company released a version of VistA under a proprietary license and last year sued the brothers who co-founded the company, Scott and Steve Shreeve, for “misappropriation of trade secrets” and other alleged violations after they posted VistA code to sourceforge.net, an open-source repository. The action outraged the open-source community; see, for instance, this impassioned retelling of Medsphere’s open-source history. Near as I can tell, the company has never officially explained itself; the closest I’ve seen it come was this “open letter” to employees, which of course is filled with classic corporate doublespeak.

The new CEO, Michael Doyle, could presumably seize the opportunity to restore Medsphere’s relationship with the open-source community and move ahead with plans to make VistA more commercially attractive by, for instance, adding a medical-billing module (something the VA never needed). Doyle, in fact, most recently served as CEO of Advantedge Healthcare Solutions, a producer of medical-billing software. (Kenneth Kizer, the former Medsphere CEO who filed the lawsuit against the Shreeves, will remain chairman of the company.)

So far, Doyle seems to be making encouraging noises in this respect. In an interview with LinuxMedNews on Monday, Doyle sang the praises of open-source development, although he continued to suggest that the company might still adopt a “hybrid” open-source model of some sort. Doyle also said he doesn’t plan to be involved in the lawsuit against the Shreeves and hopes “that it gets settled soon.”

Other commenters around the blogosphere (for instance, ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn and C/Net’s Matt Asay) have taken these developments as a sign that Medsphere is looking to put its troubles behind it. That seems a little premature to me, but there’s no reason not to hope for the best. Given that the cost and inflexibility of electronic-record systems still present major obstacles to their widespread adoption, a robust, open-source VistA that meets the needs of commercial healthcare institutions and physician practices could be a big step forward in improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of the healthcare system as a whole.