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 ?
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.