So, Microsoft recently made Developer Edition free to download and use, but during a discussion with a colleague who was being going through reconciliation he was told that you cannot download and use Developer Edition on a PC that you are using for regular work. i.e. as a DBA using the tools portion to access production systems, or reading emails...etc. He was also told that Developer Edition is not for use with production data, meaning you cannot put production data on it for testing/developing because, well, it's from production. If the system has access to a production system, you cannot use Developer Edition on it.
I was always under the impression that if you were not "serving" data to production systems, then it was not considered production. While pulling data from a production database for troubleshooting issues, fixing code...etc. that is support and development. While I would understand the need for a "CAL" license to connect to those production systems, you shouldn't need anything else to run Developer Edition.
So, my question is, what use is it then if you can't use it on your system? Even if you installed it on a "server", technically you couldn't pull production data to it, which violates the license.
There is literally no reason to use the developer edition of the product if that is the case.
Does anyone know if that is true?
John M. Couch