Looking at this it would suggest that the Developer version is not allowed to be used in production and is only there for development (and testing/QA if you have MSDN):
https://www.microsoft.com/en/server-cloud/products/sql-server-editions/sql-server-business-intellige...
Microsoft Sql Server Developer
Your options would be to migrate it to the free (including for production use), SQL Express, but this has limited features like no SQL Agent jobs and restricted max db size, or purchase the full version of SQL Standard or Enterprise depending on your needs.
Sql Server Developer Edition License Cost
The Standard Edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 supports both CAL based Licensing and CORE based Licensing. CORE 2017 Based: A retail price of $3,350 is charged against a pair of two cores and one needs to license a minimum of four cores. The Web Edition is offered only to hosters through the Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA). Developer and Express editions continue to be distributed without changes in licensing or pricing. We also offer the Analytics Platform System appliance, which includes SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse software as a component. Sep 01, 2017 The below example (Figure 3) demonstrates users accessing the application which has an embedded SQL database. No additional SQL Server licensing is required however as the cost of the SQL Server Runtime license is included in the cost of the application from the ISV. Each server license allows you to run a single instance of SQL Server 2016 in a physical or virtual environment. Option two is to license the processor cores within the server. There is a minimum purchase requirement of four core licenses per server, even if you have only one or two cores. Apr 26, 2016 So to summarize, if you say restore a prod DB to your developer edition SQL server, and only use for development and not serving any clients apart from your own development, that is fine. If you need to access production server and you are running in server/cal license model, you will need a CAL license. For SQL Server 2012 or older, that means a Developer Edition license for each person (or an MSDN subscription for each). That is not the same thing as CALs. CALs are for Standard Edition and cost a fair amount more than Developer Edition licenses. For SQL Server 2014 and newer, Developer Edition is free.