It is really sad indeed. But I suggest you take a look at the J language. It's free for commercial use, unless you want to integrate the JDB, the equivalent of KDB+ column store. It also provides a rich feature set:

http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/JDB/Announcement

http://www.jsoftware.com/jdhelp/overview.html

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/a-look-at-the-... comes very close to capturing the ingenuity of J language.

After going through the J primer, KDB+/Q feels like a distillation of J - it basically took the most accessible ideas of J and packaged them for mainstream production use - some of their features such as these make it easy to setup a computing harness for electronic trading in no time:

http://code.kx.com/wiki/Cookbook/LoadingFromLargeFiles

http://code.kx.com/wiki/Startingkdbplus/tick

Also, the footprint of the kdb runtime and installation is unparalleled. I've run systems 24 x 7 x 365