IBM has a long and strong history of supporting Open Source software — not the least of which is the harassment-fest endured from SCO — and it may be poised to add a bit more to their record, in the form of it's database management software DB2.

The Director of Information Management Software for IBM's UK division, Chris Livesey, says the changing nature of the database market may push DB2 — a popular offering consistently ranked highly in industry benchmarks — into the Open Source realm. Data management is becoming more challenging, and customers want solutions that offer self-contained real-time analytics, moving away from the current state, where data is extracted and set to an external business intelligence application for processing rather than being processed within the database management system. The integration of such processing is a tightrope walk between preserving speed and allowing complex processing within the system.

Livesey was quick to point out that there aren't any plans on paper at IBM to push DB2 towards Open-Source licensing. However, he also pointed to the existing free, but still proprietary, "light" version of DB2 already available from IBM, as well as IBM's "heritage" in Open Source as signs that some day, perhaps not too terribly far away, DB2 may find itself tagged OSS as well.