Oracle will soon be announcing the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

The free edition will be limited in usage though. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory.

The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle’s namesake database.

It feels good to see giant arrogant software makers crumble a bit under the pressure of open source software and make them more consumer friendly.