Why is Forms/Reports 6i not available as a stand alone product?

Question

Mr. Regis Louis (Senior Group Manager/Oracle Forms Product Management),
thank you for your posting to my original question/suggestion. Unfortunately, I can not say that it was an answer to my original question (or suggestion). Therefore I am opening a new thread as you suggested.
Here it goes:
I know that you are not going to change your strategy for the new product/s (9iDS and 9iAS). My question or suggestion was simply for the forms/reports developer 6i and marketing it as a separate product. By "marketing" I meant that making the forms/reports developer 6i easier to obtain and deploy for the end users (ESPECIALLY from the licensing point of view). You did NOT answer/mention any of the licensing issues/difficulties. Could you please answer the following questions:
1. Can we tell our customers to download form/reports developer 6i from OTN?
2. I was told by Oracle Partnership that our customers need to obtain an iDS license for forms/reports developer 6i to be able to run our client/server application which is developed by using forms/reports developer 6i. If the customers do NOT need other tools/programs that iDS license covers, why not making
forms/reports developer 6i a separate product (like JDeveloper 9i) so that the customers will pay ONLY for the forms/reports developer 6i? Why not paying $995 (like JDeveloper 9i) versus $5000 (for iDS license)?
3. Why not having a freely downloadable RUNTIME ONLY option (via OTN) - which will eliminate the licensing problems given that the we (the developers) are properly licensed for the forms/reports developer 6i?
I hope you will answer these questions without feeling that you should justify your decision for 9iDS and 9iAS combination. Let me emphasize again here, I am not interested in 9iDS - this is a for 6i only.
If you can not answer any licensing related questions, could you please forward it to the proper people at Oracle. There must be someone at Oracle who can say "yes we can do this or no we do not want to do it." Licensing for forms/reports developer 6i is a total mess and I want someone to fix it. I don't care about 9iDS and your push for 9iAS. This is for 6i ONLY.
Best regards

Answer 1

Zaffer,
Thank you to have created this new thread to address this specific question.
1. Can we tell our customers to download form/reports developer 6i from OTN? Yes, You can tell your customers to download the software from OTN, as long as they accept the OTN Licence terms.
2. I was told by Oracle Partnership that our customers need to obtain an iDS license for forms/reports
developer 6i to be able to run our client/server application which is developed by using forms/reports
developer 6i. If the customers do NOT need other tools/programs that iDS license covers, why not making
forms/reports developer 6i a separate product (like JDeveloper 9i) so that the customers will pay ONLY for
the forms/reports developer 6i? Why not paying $995 (like JDeveloper 9i) versus $5000 (for iDS license)? The Forms/Reports runtime Client/Server is free. If your customers are only using the Client/Server runtime, there is no need to purchase iDS.
3. Why not having a freely downloadable RUNTIME ONLY option (via OTN) - which will eliminate the licensing > problems given that the we (the developers) are properly licensed for the forms/reports developer 6i? When installing Forms/Reports 6i downloaded from OTN, you already have the option, when doing a custom install, to install the client/server runtime only. As I mention in the previous point, the deployment with Forms/reports 6i in client/server is already free.
I hope this answers your question.
Thank you for your feedback.
Regis Louis
Forms Product Management