1

I was wondering about the distribution rights of esent.dll (Extensible Storage Engine).

I know that it's included in Windows but, depending on the version of Windows, it's not the same.

For example, in Windows 2000, the initialisation is different and in Windows Vista+, there are some interesting parameters that were added.

So, instead of programming our software differently depending on the client OS, could we just take the latest version of esent.dll and distribute it with our software ?

Fotis MC
  • 323
  • 1
  • 2
  • 12
spaceboy
  • 25
  • 5
  • You should ask Microsoft. At a guess, I would say you are not allowed to distribute it, as it is _not_ free. – Oded Apr 27 '11 at 19:31

2 Answers2

1

In case you would get the permission ... how would you distribute it without problems to W2K, XP and so on ...

Marc
  • 11
  • 1
  • 1
    Yes I was planning to put it in the same directory as my .exe application. But, I don't think that we have the rights to redistribute this dll and so, the project to use ESENT was dropped because of this. If, eventually, our application doesn't support XP or less anymore, we could re-evaluate. – spaceboy Jul 07 '11 at 15:16
0

I doubt that you will be allowed to do that. Looking at Microsoft and its Windows OS you can see what an aweful burden legacy support can be. In a similar situation with ESENT I decided to just support Windows XP and for one part of my app only Windows Vista and newer, knowing that my customers are usually up to date. You could take a look into skipping support for at least Windows 2000. The ESENT API delivered with Windows XP is really powerful and you will hardly need the novelties of the newer versions.

Fotis MC
  • 323
  • 1
  • 2
  • 12