I guess I have to agree with everything that people have said so far.

However, it's probably worth saying that while MSDE was not really a consideration for anything but trivial applications, SQL Express is much more useful. So there's a class of app for which SQL express is adequate, and it's certainly difficult to claim that the license for that is too expensive.

I think some of the changes in licensing recently have made SQL Server much less competitive that it used to be. If I understand the increased costs correctly, there are many cases where a couple of years ago I would have recommended SQL Server but today I would recommend Postgres.