iTWire reports of the largest open-source deal ever with the deployment of Open-Xchange by internet service provider 1&1.

In what they claim is the largest-ever open source deal, collaboration developer Open-Xchange and web hosting company 1&1 Internet have announced a partnership to deliver over one million hosted business email and collaboration accounts using Open-Xchange's Smart Collaboration technology.

This is definitely a big boost to open source projects. I am hoping that with this deal (which definitely costs a lot of money) will enable Open-Xchange to make some "paid" features available to its Community edition.

I wonder how this will compete against Google Apps Premier Edition. :)