Canonical and IBM have announced the release of a new virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C database software, the free community edition of IBM's DB2, running on the Ubuntu cloud platform

Canonical has released a virtual appliance for running instances of IBM DB2 database software, the company announced on Wednesday.

Any debate over open vs. closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways in which companies are attempting to build code as a community effort, while still profiting from it in some way.

Canonical and IBM, as expected, have expanded their relationship. The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there's a deeper story angle here... involving Canonical's continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here's the speculation.

Open source software initially was a head-scratcher: “How can you make money selling something for free?” But once open source advocates clarified the meaning of free – “Free as in speech, not as in beer” – the open source economy took off.

When software developers and architects select open source software over commercial alternatives, there is often a premise that because the software is free, (as in beer vs. speech) there is zero cost associated with the choice.

Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days. Looks like more and more software companies and developers have seen the barriers of closed-source programs and have now fully realized the significance of freedom.

"So if anyone knows me personally, they know I am a huge Blender head and proponent of free software, meaning free as in freedom of speech not free beer. I am especially fond of any software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation.

Richard Stallman once wrote that the point about free software is it is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", meaning that people should be at liberty to do as they pleased with software, rather than subscribe to its restrictive licences.