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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Reply to a comment - Hyperion licenses

This is a post in response to a comment to a post (Hyperion products now available for download)
I have reproduced the entire comment here for convenience:
Anonymous said...

I noticed that on Oracle technology network, a developer can download the software with Development License.
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Is there a place where a developer can download the Hyperion products with "Development License" to evaluate/learn the products or even prepare for certification?
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The reason I am asking is that the 30-day trial period on e-delivery website is barely enough for something as complex as Hyperion products. It takes a while to install/configure them!! Most existing Hyperion customers have only a few products licensed and in the past, Hyperion made it very difficult for developers of those customers to get a trial license (you had to go through sales team to get trial software who wouldn't help you unless they saw immediate money). If there was a development license for Hyperion products, I am sure many of the developers of existing customers would try out some of the remaining products that they don't currently have license for and recommend them to the business users. It would be fine if the development license terms restricted use by the individual developer for non-production use Only (there are paid Hyperion developer tools such as Dashboard Architect, studio, etc. that must still be paid for if used in production environment and any development done with Development License can not be installed in production unless a paid license has also been acquired).

Note: This individual developer "development license" would be different from the "paid development environment" license which is where the development team does the development before installing it to the "paid production environment".
(hopefully it is not too confusing)
The short answer to this question is that once software is available from OTN for download, there **should** not be any license requirement.

Oracle software - all of it - comes without any timed licenses, or trial licenses that lock you out of the product or restrict you to limited functionality after x number of days. If you take the case of Siebel Business Analytics, which became Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (with some products like Oracle BI Publisher joining this suite, which in turn came from the Oracle Applications side of the company and went by the very exciting name of XML Publisher), it also had a license key that was required to install and use the different products therein, like Answers, Dashboards, Disconnected, etc... It took some time to take out the license key requirements from the product, and when Oracle released Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.2 (aka code name of 'Maui'), it had no license key restrictions. BI EE 10.1.3.2.1 does not have a license key, nor will 10.1.3.3.0 (due very soon), or other releases.

I totally agree that a 30 day license is probably not enough to install, use, and learn the product family - I would prefer 90 days, and Hyperion does have many products that do not exactly fall in the 'Notepad' variety of easy-to-install-and-learn products (Planning, budgeting, financial performance management, etc...).

At this point I don't really have an answer - what you could try is to download and install the products with the 30 day license, and after the 30 day period try and obtain a new 30 day license file and see if that works.

Note that please do not take this as 'legal' advice from Oracle. This is my personal 2 cents (or चार आने char anne in my lingo).