Yahoo is preparing to launch its own cloud platform.

Yahoo is planning to open source its cloud application platform.

Todd Papaioannou, Yahoo's vice president of cloud architecture, said the company doesn't view cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage and is therefore willing to open source its code.

According to Papaioannou, the company believes that its own cloud project will allow Yahoo to more efficiently utilize its Internet capacity and will provide companies and developers with a free platform for creating their own clouds.

With Yahoo's cloud platform, developers will be able to build their services in containers without having to rely on virtual machines. This will position Yahoo's offering as a cross between IaaS (Amazon Web Services) and PaaS (Google App Engine).

The project is currently in alpha, and the final version will be released by the end of March. According to Papaioannou, the code will be open-sourced before the end of this year. Before the open-source release, some Yahoo-specific components that are not particularly useful to others will be removed.

Yahoo's cloud platform is built using Java and C++ and will support PHP and JavaScript. Once open-sourced, users will be able to add other languages, such as Python.