ZDNet and its sister sites ran an interesting story yesterday indicating that IBM might be preparing to release its DB2 database under an open source license. If true, it would be a fascinating turn of events that would have a significant impact on the database industry. Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was immediately suspicious when reading the initial story. For a start it quotes a UK IBM executive: IBM’s UK director of information management software, Chris Livesey. With all due respect to him, if IBM was even hinting at open sourcing DB2, it would surely be rolling out the big guns.

Additionally, I’ve had briefings in the last couple of weeks with both IBM’s data management and open source executives, neither of whom thought to mention open sourcing DB2. That didn’t rule it out entirely of course.

Then there was what Livesey was actually quoted as saying:

“We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core [DB2] technology. Looking at IBM’s heritage in contributing to the open-source market, we’ve been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space as a whole. As the future unfolds and the economics become clearer, there’s going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We’ve made good steps towards that.”

To me it just smacked of theorizing, while ZDNet’s opening gambit “IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 database-management software under an open-source licence” is similarly speculative.

Then of course there is the issue of why IBM would open source DB2. Where is the business driver? Despite solid competition from Oracle and Microsoft, the company is doing pretty well with DB2 as it stands, thanks very much, and open source databases have had minimal impact on the established vendors.

Also, while the company has open sourced some proprietary products in the past, the company is not open sourcing everything it has a la Sun, and prefers where possible to sponsor, or build on top of, existing projects.

The interesting thing about IBM when it comes to speculation is that it genuinely doesn’t comment on it. Unlike some companies that drip-feed a response or hide their real response behind a platitude, you generally know where you are with IBM and “IBM does not comment on speculation”.

It takes a pretty special bit of speculation to get IBM to diverge from this mantra. In this context, IBM’s statement is about as unequivocal as it gets: “IBM has no plans to open source DB2″.