Access fits this bill with the exception of needing a runtime.
I can’t imagine really much of any decent RAD development tool that does not require some type of runtime. I mean even going back to FoxPro DOS days, you still had to provide a runtime, and for development of all versions of VB all the way up to VB6, then you had to ensure and provide a runtime (on the other hand, it immensely helped that Windows XP, vista, and windows 7 all shipped with visual basic runtimes).
In fact, even when you produce executables using the .net development, again you have to install a runtime system.
Keep in mind that one great advantage of an executable runtime system , is once the runtime system is installed on the target machine, then your updates are simply a x-copy development paradigm. Thus means each update to your software is simply a copy of a new program without needing the support libaries.
For example Access has a terrific and very rich reporting system. Once the runtime is installed. Then each new update to your software will result in very small if any growth at all in the resulting application size. Deploying that new application will generally as a rule be very small in size. It does not make sense to redeploy and reissue all of the runtime bits and pieces that that application environment requires. With a runtime system you only do this ONCE.
So while there are some downsides of requiring a runtime system, there are also some significant upsides. Those advantages particularly show themselves when you’re offering many frequent updates to your software. Of course once the development cycle is complete, and updates and new feature request become quite rare for your software, then I would certainly concede that having a stand alone executable system has its advantages.
For the most part the combined philosophy and approach of our WHOLE software industry has much left behind the concept of a stand alone executable. So, Just about any decent and productive development environment today will require all kinds of things like connectivity to the web, rich report writers etc.
To be fair there is a trend towards what we call application virtualization application or app streaming in which in a complex application with many dependencies is deployed as a single .exe. However, despite deploying the application as a single .exe, the development paradigm and tools used to create that .exe still requires a Feature rich runtime package to be included with that .exe, it just hidden to the OS and this application virtualization concept does solve the .dll breakage and dependencies issue very well indeed.
So Access offers completely royalty free distribution, but you have to produce you install package that includes a runtime.
However I can say this is really much different than what we’ve had for many years with visual basic, the old DOS FoxPro, or now .net. It standard fair you need a runtime, and going all the way back to Foxpro or DBASE days that was also the case.