The largest web host in Europe, and one of the largest in the world, said this week that it has joined the Open Source Business Foundation, making open source technology an important feature of its plan.

German hosting firm 1&1 internet said Wednesday that it had joined the Foundation, based in Nuremberg, Germany, a European network of open source developers with more than 120 members.

1&1 says through its membership in the foundation, it is seeking to “actively promote the acceptance of open source solutions in companies and to profit from cooperation with open source developers.”

As OSBF’s latest member, 1&1 says it is out to demonstrate how the deployment of open source solutions can propel business success. The company says its own success has been linked to open source developments from the start. More than 90 percent of the more than 3 million websites hosted by the company are hosted on open source technology. The company operates more than 40,000 Linux servers and employs more than 400 open source developers.

1&1 says its own developments are redistributed into the community. For example, the company says it developed the qooxdoo.org Ajax framework, focused on graphic al user interfaces with support for JavaScript development. That project is available to the open source community at large.