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.”

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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.