Is anyone on the forum using the Innovator-C Edition? If so, how did you obtain your entitlement jar file (ie_edition.jar)?
I ask because it seems that no one at IBM knows.
We have licenses for Workgroup Edition for our primary application, and have recently upgraded from an embarrassingly old release to 14.10.FC7. We have another system that is quite small, and is running on an even older release. For that system, we installed 14.10.FC6 and struggled to find anyone at our VAR or at IBM who could explain how to get the default Developer Edition to be licensed as Innovator Edition. We knew that it required the ie_edition.jar file, but could not find where to get that. We asked our VAR. I opened a support ticket and received the response that "Innovator-C only has 'community support', unless you have purchased Elite Support for Innovator-C." Somewhere along the way, someone provided a link to a page that had an ie_edition.jar file available for download, but it was for 14.10.FC1. Support did eventually take pity on us and provided an entitlement jar file for 14.10.FC6.
Fast forward a few weeks. 14.10.FC7 was released, and it actually fixed a weird SPL-related bug that was causing us fits in our primary application, so we upgraded our Workgroup Edition instances. I attempted to upgrade our Innovator-C instance, but the jar file that we have is only valid for the FC6 release. Attempting to apply it to the FC7 installation gives a message that it was successful, yet the instance retains the "DE" suffix in the onstat output, and all of the restrictions of Developer Edition are enforced.
We did purchase Elite Support for Innovator-C. With that in hand, I opened another support ticket. The response was quick. "We (HCL) provide support for technical problems with Informix. This is a licensing problem, and as such, must be addressed by Passport Advantage (IBM)."
Support did create a ticket on our behalf with Passport Advantage. The response was quick (notice a pattern?) - "Please be advised that you have Elite Support for Informix Innovator-C Edition but you do not have the subscription to download the software or files for the same."
WHAT???
The email did provide the email address for someone I could contact for additional information. Her response (not quite as quick) - "I do not have access to that so there is no way to send it over. As far as your subscription support, do you pay annually for the support?"
So, IBM markets Innovator-C as "A robust database environment that supports small production workloads and is free for development, testing, and small production use.", but no one there seems to know how to get it licensed as an Innovator-C instance.
I get that it's a free edition, so they make no money from it. But in this case, they
do make money via the Elite Support. And, in all honesty, the application for which we are using Innovator is so small that we could easily fit it inside a Developer Edition instance, but using DE in a production system would violate the terms of the license.
Among the benefits listed for Elite Support is "access to fixes, updates, ..." Well, we're updating from FC6 to FC7, so ...?
If it is "free for development, testing, and small production use," why would we need to pay for subscription support? And since we are paying for subscription support for a non-free edition as well, why can't we access this "free" version, along with the entitlement jar file(s) necessary to make it operate? And if Elite Support includes access to updates, why can we not access the file(s) for the edition on which we are paying support?
I would expect that we could find the necessary files for Innovator-C using our existing Passport Advantage login. All that is out there is the Workgroup Edition files.
Why do they make this so difficult?
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Mark Collins
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#Informix