The thing I find strange about the whole FTP debacle, is why Filezilla misses the mark on so many usability issues. Filezilla must be one of the top 50 most popular open source apps out there at the moment. Why does it have simple, fundamental usability problems that products like SmartFTP and FlashFXP do so much better? All a good FTP program really needs is a file browser on the left, a file browser on the right and a queue down the bottom. Then you just hook the three panels up in the most sensible fashion and your done… Surely someone with the skills could jump into Filezilla’s code and make it a little bit more competitive?
How many people who use open source as part of their ‘stack’ are
actually a) capable and b) prepared to seriously pick up their
abandoned pet projec
Free Software worst case: You have to pay someone else to do it for you.
Proprietary Software worst case: It can’t be done at any price.
If my business was on the line, I know which problem I’d rather have.
@Steve and other Linuxy folks snarking about it: There is “decent support” in Windows for FTP. You can either use the command line (which works fine, really) or (at least you used to) Internet Explorer
For a very long time I was able to do whatever I needed to without spending a lot of money on software. The two biggest ‘money sinks’ were always Photoshop – which I eventually traded in for a paid license for Paint Shop Pro – and have since moved to Paint.NET.
The second one was dev tools, mainly Visual Basic and/then Visual Studio. To a certain degree work used to provide me with that software, and hey, there’s even Express Versions of the stuff if you really want to stretch it. Including SQL server.
Given all this and that, I believe that whether your OS ‘comes with’ (i.e. you have to install packages) software or you spend 10 minutes to look for a free/open source alternative: unless you’re talking Enterprise level it really shouldn’t take much money at all to get “better” utilities for doing whatever you want to do.
The point of Jeff’s article was the pain in the ass process OF getting those products should you wish to give them money.
“Living in Europe, I don’t accept that my personal data be processed in the US. A country that legalized torture. Read PayPal terms of use!”
I agree that PayPal sucks. But including your little anti-American jibe in there was VERY classy and was a perfect fit given the context of the statement.
If you’re on a Windows platform, …
don’t even ask about Ada. (hey, everyone has their perversions…)
http://www.aonix.com/objectada.html
http://www.adacore.com/home/
http://www.mingw.org/ (Roughly same compiler as above, but no paid commerical support)
Windows is actually one of Ada’s better supported platforms.
There’s no doubt that SmartFTP is the superior FTP client. I’m more than happy to register and reward them for their years of development work.
hahahahha…it’s FTP, it ain’t rocket science.
winSCP works for me.
I would like feedback on this: I have a small time shareware site and charge $15 to $25 to register my software. My experience is that if I offer the software for free (nag screen or not) 1 in 1000 people using the software will donate. Therefore I give a 45 day free trial (easily worked around by anyone who is clever and crooked). There is a link to my website from the menu bar in the software. The website shows two PayPal buttons, one a single user license and the other a site license (20 users). Once registered a time sensitive registration key which will work for one month is emailed to the buyer along with a login and password to the website. The login and password allows the buyer to retrieve a new registration keys from the website at any time in the future. Does anyone have a better way to do it? Writing the software is a lot of work and I am not going to it for free.
This post is actually a very good example of one of the main reasons why I prefer to use Free Software, even if there’s a shareware solution that’s otherwise nicer. I don’t violate licenses, and I don’t run software I feel morally obligated to help pay for if I’m not going to pay for it.
Free Software I can run with little hassle and a clear conscience. I can use it anywhere I may find myself needing it in the future without having to worry about keys or activations or even paper issues with the license terms. That’s worth a lot to me.
FTP-applications in general are hugely overpriced.
An avarage of $ 40,- for an application who’s only
job is to copy files to a server, come on !..
If Jeff.IsAnnoyed Then
BlogPost_Today = RaiseHellAgainst(DifficultRegistrations)
End If
Rage against the machine, dude!!
“you are just renting.”
Well duuuuhhhh…
That’s how ALL software is paid for nowadays. It’s what you agree to when you agree to the EULA.
It’s also pretty much the only way developers can get recompensed for something that can be duplicated and distributed by a single customer at effectively no cost.
The “pay for support” argument doesn’t work, because it doesn’t pay for the original development, and it doesn’t reward the developer for making a flawless product in the first place.
Let’s say you reload your XP machine in a couple of years and
Microsoft decides, nope, you can’t activate XP anymore
- Do you really consider this a realistic scenario?
I don’t know about the “couple of years”, but its certain to happen eventually.
- Even in the unbelievably remote chance this did come to pass,
wouldn’t there be umpteen million cracks and hacks available
through a simple web search that would let you get around this?
That would violate the license. I don’t do that. My company definitely doesn’t.
Jeesh. Wasn’t it just last week that you were calling me a pirate? 
I know people already commented on Transmit by Panic and the way prevalent for Mac shareware, but I still wanted to weigh in with the Ambrosia way. You can easily buy the code for Ambrosia stuff (utilities and games) on their web store (the good old email, fax, phone, and snail mail are still available as well) and get it instantly sent to you by email, code which you then enter in the product (possibly offline, no activation required), and from now it’ll work forever on that computer. If you change computer you’ll have to enter the code again, but since it’s presumably kept in your email archives it’s not usually a problem, and they have an automated system that can send you back your codes to your email adress if you lost the code anyway. One thing they added is the fact that codes expire: you can still use the product forever, but if you need to enter the code again (on a new computer or after a reformat) more than one month later it will have to be renewed, which can be done automatically, instantly, for free over the net from within the app, or you can use the automated system to be sent back a new code. It’s explained pretty well in their article: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?act=STf=26t=34059 but what’s more interesting is the comments from Andrew (el Presidente of Ambrosia) where he says that the number one design goal was that the system had to not inconvenience paying users, not absolute security; there is also another where he says he hates working on anti-piracy schemes, but it’s a necessity if they are to stay in business, so that it is more inconvenient to pirate the product rather than to pay for it. I think they did a very good job of it.
I just donated $10 to the dev of AllSnap (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~iheckman/allsnap/) which I picked out from my notification area as a free app I use and didn’t have pay for. Here’s to karma!
re: Nicholas Piasecki
I stopped using Filezilla about a year and a half ago when I
discovered it suffered from a rare, but very serious multi-threading
problem: sometimes it would swap the contents of files during an upload.
Yep… that’s why I stopped using Filezilla FOREVER. 100% reliability if pretty much the price of entry for such a simple piece of software. I simply can’t believe Filezilla made such a bad mistake. I used WS_FTP for years until it’s interface got too clunky for me to handle.
Then, finally, I started using FireFTP. Now there’s a basic cross-platform FTP client I can use with exactly the same interface on any OS. For the amount that I FTP, I can’t imagine ever downloading another FTP client again.
Great article. I always want straight forward and simple procedures that are just for my needs, nothing more nothing less. And if the steps are lightning fast (eg. loading a web page), all the better.
Windows developers seem to be made of money. One of the reasons I got out of the Windows world a decade ago was the cash I was shelling out just to stay current.
That would be, with all due respect, because Windows developers MAKE money. Yes, I know you can make money using FOSS but you do have to work harder at it. Windows developers have no problem spending money because they use it to make money. It’s an ecosystem.
With FOSS I always feel like “well I can find a tool to do this if someone felt like writing one”. With Windows there’s pretty much ALWAYS someone who’s written something to do what you want since they know the ecosystem just accepts paying for it. Money makes things happen, and happen faster.
So on point.
Product activation is probably the last feature where any usability analysis gets done but it’s the most important one to the end revenue.
There might be a room for a niche business here, although I’m not sure that micro ISVs have any money to pay you. 
Jeff: your website is crying out for the ability to let commenters reply to other people’s comments. When 40 people per post are using the “@” designation to talk to each other, maybe it’s time to turn on per-comment replies…?
“If you don’t mind wasting your time with a commandline ftp”
For what it’s worth, I switched to a command line ftp client (ncftp) about a year ago (from FileZilla) and have had no regrets. It is free (as in Freedom, not just as in ‘lunch’), and it has all of the same functionality that I care about.
Though the command line learning curve may seem off-putting, it is incredibly expressive and time-saving; the drag-n-drop GUI interface is clunky and slow by comparison.