Canonical, the Ubuntu people, is going to start selling support contracts for IBM's freebie DB2 Express-C database. It's the first time Ubuntu users will be able to buy an annual subscription service directly from the company. It's also going to offer the thing as a virtual appliance running on VMware. The $3,750-a-year subscription covers both IBM and Canonical support as well as clustering, data replication and higher resource limits for greater scalability.