Rugby, 31 March 2009 – credativ, the largest independent European Linux services and support consultancy, announced today that it has joined the international Linux Foundation. credativ will join companies such as Intel, HP, Bull, Google and IBM to advance the Linux platform.

By joining the Linux Foundation, credativ will be contributing to the promotion, protection and standardisation of Linux to enable it to successfully gain further market share against other platforms.

Through its participation in the Linux Foundation, credativ will be bringing first hand experience from Europe where the Linux developer and user communities are strong and have widespread growing support. In addition, credativ believes a shift in the market is evidenced by the 10-point action plan recently announced by the U.K. government to encourage greater use of open source software in the public sector. 

credativ has offices in the UK, Germany and Canada and currently employs the largest group of Debian developers within a Linux consultancy in Europe. The open source consultancy is particularly keen to use its membership of the Linux Foundation to further promote the development of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Involvement with the Linux Foundation will benefit credativ's large Debian client base as well as the interests of its own Debian developers.

Chris Halls, UK MD of credativ Ltd, commented on the open source consultancy's decision to join the Linux Foundation: "With our successful provision of open source services in both the UK and Germany, coupled with our active contribution to the community, we believe that credativ can provide a significant contribution to the international Open Source arena and will help to shape the future of the open source industry for all Linux distributions, applications, vendors and companies using and offering free software services."

He continued, "Since the launch of the Open Source Support Centre in the UK in November 2007, we have noticed a strong uptake of our support services for all major Linux distributions and applications. In addition, demand has also increased for our open source project management services, Nagios monitoring, Linux training and support for open source software combined with proprietary environments."

In spite of the global economic downturn, credativ has experienced significant growth in both the UK and Germany. The company already provides many large organisations using Debian or Linux distributions based on Debian with support and consultancy through its Open Source Support Centre and this is a prominent factor in its success. In fact, the firm has enjoyed its best financial year since its 1999 foundation, as well as experiencing more than 20% growth in turnover during the two previous years.

"Our success is down to the quality and in depth knowledge of open source for business and we believe that it is also a testament to the increasing number of organisations that are adopting open source for their IT infrastructure."

credativ Limited is an independent consulting and service company situated in Rugby. credativ has specialised in the planning and implementation of professional solutions through the use of free software since 1999 in Germany and in the UK since 2004.

credativ has operated the Open Source Support Centre (OSSC) in Germany since 2006, offering professional 24x7 business support for many open source projects. credativ has 45 employees across its offices in the UK, Germany and Canada.

The OSSC supports distributions and applications including: Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xandros, SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Linspire, Mandriva, Slackware, Open BSD Gnome, KDE, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Slony, Zarafa, eGroupware, Kolab Groupware, Scalix, SugarCRM, vtiger, CITADEL, Mozilla-Firefox, Mozilla-Suite, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Wine, Apache, Asterisk, OpenSER, FreePBX, OpenPBX, CallWeaver, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, OpenLDAP, OTRS, RT, Samba, Cyrus, Dovecot, Exim, Postfix, sendmail, Amanda, Bacula, DRBD, Heartbeat, Keepalived, Nagios, Open Security Filter, Ferm, FAI, Squid, XEN, VirtualBox, VMware.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the LF sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world.

The open source model has transformed software development by providing faster demand-side learning, higher quality, better security, shorter development cycles, and lower prices than closed platform development models.

For Linux to remain open and attain the greatest ubiquity possible, important services must be provided, including legal protection, standardization, promotion and collaboration. The Linux Foundation has been founded to help close the gap between open source and proprietary platforms, while sustaining the openness, freedom of choice and technical superiority inherent in open source software.