1&1 Internet Opts for Open Source Business Foundation Membership

May 22, 2008; 01:24 AM

1&1 Internet, the world's leading web host, has joined Open Source Business Foundation e.V. - (OSBF). Seated in Nuremberg, Open Source Business Foundation is a European network of the open source sector and already has more than 120 members - innovative companies as well as scientific institutes and public-sector bodies. "Open source solutions played and continue to play a formative part in business developments at our company," says Achim Weiss, CTO of 1&1. "The professional use of open source early on has clearly given us competitive advantages." Today, 1&1 is a market leading web host worldwide. Through its membership and engagement in Open Source Business Foundation, 1&1 seeks to actively promote acceptance of open source solutions in companies and to profit from cooperation with other open source developers.

OSBF's latest member, 1&1, demonstrates how strongly the deployment of open source solutions can propel business success, as the success of 1&1 has been linked to open source developments from the outset. Over 90 percent of the three million and more private and business websites hosted with 1&1 today are based on open source technology. More than 40,000 servers at 1&1's data centers in Europe and the US operate on Linux. The company employs about 400 developers and programmers, and a large number of the 3,515 jobs depend directly or indirectly on open source. By the same token, developments are redistributed back into the community, where they are made available to all companies and programmers on a cost-free basis. One example of open source projects initiated by 1&1 is www.qooxdoo.org, an Ajax framework that focuses on graphical user interfaces and includes support for professional JavaScript development via a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.