Hoping to appeal to smaller businesses and fend off competition from open-source rivals, Oracle plans to release a free version of its database software. The company has not made it official yet, but the expectation is that by week’s end, Oracle will announce that Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) will be available for free download before the end of the year. Oracle rolled out a new version of the 10g today, but did not refer to the free version.