Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Nov 2005 14:35 UTC, submitted by Fletcher
Teo Wan Ping, IBM Singapore's brand manager for information management, said that IBM could "potentially offer" a free starter edition of DB2, as part of the company's strategy to gain mindshare for its database product. IBM currently does not have a free version of its DB2 product, unlike free competing products like Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and Oracle's Database XE released recently.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I'm not so sure it will work. What likely will happen is that free databases like Postgresql, MySQL,... will improve much quicker when more people get to know what to demand from a good RDBMS. If some version of DB2 is freely available it will also be much easier to make sure that free RDBMSes stays compatible with commercial products.
As Postgressql and other free databases gets better, in terms of features, support and performance, nobody will settle for limited editions from IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.
The only way to fight this would be for IBM/Oracle/ Microsoft, to hire key developrs in free softwarare database projects and have them work on their propriatory product instead, or at least have them not work on a free database.