Can Microsoft.Web.Administration be redistributed

Question

User-45658547 posted

This is a licensing question:

We are building an administration tool in .Net that interacts, amongst other things, with IIS7 web applications. We have used Microsoft.Web.Administration to implement this, and it works very well. However, it is not clear that we can include that assembly with our application when we supply it to clients.

I've found two sources for Microsoft.Web.Administration.

1) Enable IIS on a machine, and it is made available in a well-documented location

2) It is published as a NuGet package.

Using 1) would imply that we have to require users of our tool to have IIS enabled on the machine they are running it on, even though they may be using it to administer IIS on other servers. Not ideal, but we could live with it.

The NuGet package doesn't make any mention of how it is licensed. No license, to me, means you can't make any assumptions about what you can and can't do with it.

Can anyone point me at the license terms? Not "I think it is all right to...", but an official statement that I can present to our legal team.

Answer 1

User690216013 posted

The NuGet package does not seem to be official, as the owner does not appear to be Microsoft employee. Before it is clarified, using it can raise significant licensing issue.

Thus, your only choice is to rely on the local IIS installation, which has no licensing issues at all (as all Windows users should have a valid license already for all Windows components). Normally this can be easily done via installer technologies (and it seems that you are already aware of how-to).

Microsoft is going to centralize all its packages on a dedicate NuGet feed, so in the future you will get official packages with clear licensing terms published.

Answer 2

User-45658547 posted

Thanks for that - I hadn't noticed that the owner was not clearly "Microsoft". That does indeed make our way forward clear.

I have since discovered that it is only IIS Manager that needs to be enabled, which is also a bonus.