I spent a bit of time today looking into the redistribution requirements for things that ship with Visual Studio for someone today. (Part of testing is of course to see that we stay in compliance with the various licenses of tools we use to produce software after all.) Here is the verdict.

According the the Microsoft Software License Terms Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition section 3ci you can distribute:

REDIST.TXT Files. You may copy and distribute the object code form of code listed in REDIST.TXT files, plus any files listed on the REDIST list located at:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=100327&clcid=0x409.

I don’t have Visual Studio installed on my machine, but John D. Cook sent me the copy of REDIST.TXT from his install which I have put online to view here.

I last had to look up this sort of thing 5 or 6 years ago and seem to recall hoops of extra licensing being required. It’s nice to see that no longer being the case.