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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the author's frustration, I think they should take a moment and look in the mirror. A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity. Their reasons really aren't that relevant here. Likewise the rant about Mozilla is completely unfounded. There are many things to be upset at in the modern software world, this is not one of them.

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I disagree. Hosting licensed copies of software is the norm. Steam does it, Google does it, Apple does it, EA and Ubisoft do it, and all of them host much larger software (including free updates) than FileZilla. Maybe hosting 5GiB image downloads on a dedicated web portal the same way Microsoft does is a bit much to ask, but this is nothing.

We're talking 50 megabytes of storage here, per version. They can save themselves a lot of hosting money by letting lifetime subscribers download the latest version, but that'll cut into their profit margins of course. Even if they don't want to host the setup on their website, providing a 50MiB installer file on request has to be the bare minimum customer support I'd expect.

My experience is that some people do confuse FileZilla with Mozilla. That said, everyone I know just uses the free version, despite the spyware that's bundled with the installer.

Based on this post, I wouldn't buy their professional subscription.

> Hosting licensed copies of software is the norm. Steam does it, Google does it, Apple does it, EA and Ubisoft do it

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they do not store previous versions for you to choose, only the current version.

If you have an iphone on an old version of ios, you can install the latest version of some software you bought/downloaded for free compatible with that ios version.

Or you get an error and can't do that despite the popup prompting you to do so

Steam often provides every version of a product. (The ui has no option to download them, but you can fetch them via the builtin console)

This is irrelevant since your steam game license applies to all subsequent versions. The argument is it's immoral sell version specific licenses with no way to get to said specific version.

This is a little tangent, but up until somewhat recently Apple hosted ftp servers with old versions of Mac OS available. So you could get system 7.6 (released 1997) straight from them for a new install on your old machine. I think that is no longer the case, but within the last decade you still could. (I think, idk, time flies)

Amusingly, download.info.apple.com still appears to serve all the files that used to be on the old FTP site, including a small and somewhat random subset of old system software versions for Mac and Apple II, Newton firmware updates, etc., but directory browsing isn't enabled, so you need direct links, which you can get from the Wayback machine[1].

But once you have the links, you can download the actual files directly from Apple, e.g., if you're ready to upgrade your Mac Plus to the latest and greatest version of System 6, download

https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141025043714/http://www.info.a...

That's because they allow you to download new updates with your existing license.

In this case, the existing license is only valid up to a certain point, after which you need to buy a subscription (because the perpetual license wasn't quite so perpetual).

>A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity.

It is however, quite reasonable to expect that downloads will be available as long as the vendor is still in business, especially if the cost of hosting is marginal. Apple could theoretically sell you songs/albums on itunes, and tell you to rebuy if for whatever reason you lost your phone and didn't back up the file, but most people would think that's a dick move.

FileZilla explicitly and emphatically sells a license, not a download. In fact, technically not even the initial download is included in the purchase. They’re technically within their rights to never even give you the software, just say “all we ever sold you was a promise not to sue”, but we’d all agree that’s a scam, right? So, where’s the line?

Point of comparison, Steam, CodeCanyon, and Gumroad all let you re-download the version you licensed indefinitely.

Think about how little it costs to be a free hosting provider for a handful of 15MB downloads, maybe one per major version, and just for people that paid you in the past. It's next to nothing. In particular, cloudflare will give you 10GB of free object storage with unlimited bandwidth and 10 million downloads a month. So yes, they should host the installer forever.

To put it another way, the cost to provide downloads forever instead of just once is less than a penny. It should be built in to the purchase.

Good faith and common sense is being violated. That’s a valid point here.

Good faith ended at sale and support. Common sense isn’t at play because who is going to host installation media for eternity? No. There’s a nothing burger here.

Who mentioned eternity?

> A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity.

Thank you.

This is like people who think $5 is too much for an app. We've become entitled to think software is free because giants pour lots of ad-riddled software in our laps.

You bought the car. You can use the car forever. If you lose it, that's on you.

> This is like people who think $5 is too much for an app. We've become entitled to think software is free because giants pour lots of ad-riddled software in our laps.

Your complaint is misplaced. Software takes work, and updates take work. Hosting <100MB installers doesn't take work.

It basically is zero cost to keep those files available somewhere.

> You bought the car. You can use the car forever. If you lose it, that's on you.

If the manufacturer had a button that could summon the car I lost, and refused to press it, that would reflect extremely badly on them.

> Hosting <100MB installers doesn't take work.

> It basically is zero cost to keep those files available somewhere.

You don't know that.

Maybe it was put in a bucket or host that died when the company switched to a subscription model. Maybe they don't have copies on hand. Maybe it was a previous team that owned it. Maybe a different owner.

You're assuming a possibility space of zero chance of work on their behalf. There are lots of things that could have happened.

Some of those errors would be understandable (but still reflect pretty badly on the company), but given they said they refuse to allow downloads it doesn't sound like they lost the data.

If they don't have copies on hand, they could fix that with a one time effort that still comes out as negligible overall.

Also if they can prevent just a few support tickets, they'd save money from the effort.

It's 2025, not 1995 or even 2005. Installers for apps like this are tiny for cloud storage today. Cloudfront's recent flat tier pricing would even probably do the trick. free tier is 100gb data transfer a month, 1m requests. If that doesn't work, Pro is 50 tb, 10m requests, that's 15 bucks a month.

> A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity.

exactly. If you buy a music CD and lose that CD, while you have the license of the music on that CD, you should not get a free CD as replacement.

if you buy a software license, at least store the install binary?

If one bought Total Commander 30 years ago they can still download (from authors site) and use the latest version

Filezilla is horrible software compared to software like Transmit. What you have to understand is that someone with no artistic vision sat down and decided to build an FTP client for the masses. Fortunately, vibe coding will fix this. We will have much better software in the future. It will be free. It will be a commodity.

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