WebLogic Server

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Oct 29, 2008:
Oracle Support have told me they are pleased to announce that the older versions of BEA products are now available at http://commerce.bea.com.
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As many WebLogic savvy folks know Oracle is diligently moving things like dev2dev, its assets like articles and code samples along with other aspects of BEA's public developer presence over to Oracle Technology Network. The process was summarized a few months back in this post from our combined OTN and Dev2Dev team.

Unfortunately, as probably should be expected in such a migration things do not go perfectly. In general it has been pretty good but over the last week and a bit we frankly have had a logistical screw up that is causing some serious pain for customers who need to get older releases of our software. What happened is the software that used to be located on the commerce.bea.com site was taken offline and as a result, those older releases/upgrades/service packages are no longer available publicly for download.

We are working on resolving this shortly but in the meantime the repeat support and customer question we are getting is: Where do I get "BEA Product Version X" or "BEA Product Service Pack Y" or "BEA upgrade installer Z" etc.

To help with this here is where things currently are - and once you know this things don't look so bad but it is slightly more complex to get these older software binaries in the interim while we resolve the issue:

1. Most current releases of the BEA products and re-branded Oracle versions can be downloaded from two places:

a. Oracle Technology Network. Here is where the products tend to be:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/bea_main.html

and for WebLogic Server proper:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/index.html

b. If there are platforms not there as these downloads tend to be aimed at developers, the other major place - in fact where we encourage licensed customers to download from - is http://edelivery.oracle.com.

2. If you do not find the version, service pack, upgrade installer etc you are looking for from the above locations, the best thing to do is log a service request with BEA Support - http://support.bea.com - using your customer account (which anyone typically needing older software should have) and they have full access as you would expect to the repository and can get you the download you need.

Some folks seem to think that this means we have suddenly dropped support for older products because they are no longer available. This could not be further from the truth. Per the post of last week, all products will be supported per the lifetime support policy on Oracle.com and will remain available for download for their lifetime.

I would like to say the fix is imminent but initial reads indicate this could take until the end of the month to resolve. Once this is back, we expect to return to the previous approach where older versions were available for download, we expect through the same mechanism as before.

Apologies in advance for the pain this caused - we were starting to feel pretty good about our record with the migration to OTN so I suppose we were due for some comeuppance :-(