IBM recently announced a free version of DB2 database server called DB2 Express-C. This follows after both Oracle and Microsoft had announced free versions of Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005 respectively few months back.

With more developers coming to expect open source and free software, the trend is hard not to follow. With MySQL and Postgresql already being open source and with increasing features, there is a good amount of choice available. Therefore no database vendor wants to lose the mindshare of developer community by not providing a free version of its own.

Evidently, the IBM version will have only limiation of 4 Gb of memory, and restricted to maximum of 2 CPUs, on AMD or Intel based machines.