Oracle moving fom a premium software vendor into a shareware style company is far from a positive move for them, or the industry.
Why? Seems like a smart way to introduce your product to a larger audience. The "Oracle" lite will not be powerful enough for a company to run their applications with and when they outgrow it they'll move into the more powerful version.
This is kind of like giving the users a "test-Drive". I don't know if they still do, but Microsoft used to give a one-licensed version of SQLServer away a few years ago. I never used it so I don't know what it's limitations were, but I remember seeing a free version available.