I am currently writing my thesis paper so that I can finally get out of the university. I am writing about open source and the effects on the relational database software market. Actually I am currently researching the topic to get a better idea of what exactly I want to write on. The current plan is to finish my exposé sometime in April and finishing this entire thing by the end of this summer.

I am quite happy with the selection of books I have already found. However it seems like my university cannot help me with getting some reliable market data. I feel it would be very important to get this kind of data tough. IDC and Gartner obviously have this kind of data, but buying directly from them seems out of my reach.

So does anyone have any hints on how to acquire this kind of data legally? Is there maybe some place where I could get this kind of data based on the fact that I am a student. Maybe one of the open source organizations could help? Maybe someone is working in an organization with access to IDC/Gartner reports which allows them to share this information. If necessary, and if it does not jeopardize the credibility of my final paper, I am certainly willing to officially cooperate with organizations/companies to get this paper on solid grounds.

The only other solution I have right now is to continue to scavenge off of news sites that make claims about data published in IDC/Gartner reports. I wonder where they get these infos from anyways? However I prefer to reference the source and obviously it would be much nicer to get more than these little bits.

Maybe you can get in contact with Kristian Koehntopp (http://kris.koehntopp.de/) who joined MySQL AB to work as a database consultant in the EMEA area. Perhaps he can provide you with some info or contacts concerning this topic.
(I don´t know him personally, only reading his blogs)

You could try to contact IT magazines and see if they give you some data.

I suspect you could also contact gartner & co and state it is for your thesis, they might be willing to help.

have you contacted the different open source organizations yet? I could imagine they might have some information on this. And as Arnaud said, contact Gartner and other such organizations, they might be willing to support students writing their thesis.