IBM announces DB2 will have a free edition . MS SQL and Oracle already give one.

Some of the limitations for the above free editions:

The Oracle version: . It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk space and 1GB of memory

IBM DB2 : It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on Advanced Micro Devices- or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users.

It will be interesting to know how many will actually go for these free editions instead of the other OSS options.