FileZilla Pro "Perpetual License" – A Warning to All Users

Your right to receive updates is limited to the time that you selected when you ordered FileZilla Pro.

If you have, infact, ordered a "Perpetual License", then you would have agreed to the Terms and Conditions when ordering FileZilla (here's a random old copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20211128083132/https://store.fil...)

It clearly says in the T&C that you agreed to:

  > All risk of loss for the Products shall pass to You upon delivery of the Products to the location specified in Your Order (even if no signature is required for delivery). For the avoidance of doubt, the delivery of downloaded Products occurs when the Products are downloaded.

FileZilla's Terms and Conditions are a mess. https://filezillapro.com/terms-and-conditions/

It does say:

> In a one-off purchase you will have a right to receive services or other rights for the maximum period of time indicated in the package you have purchased or ‒ missing that indication ‒ for up to five years.

It also says:

> Unless registered, your copy will not receive updates and will not exploit the services of the Software.

So, I would assume that if you purchased the Lifetime license, and you registered the software within the 4 required weeks, then they are infact breaking their contract with you.

Your complaint is misplaced. Software takes work, and updates take work. Hosting 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.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/adobe-releases-creative-...

> Similar logic applies here, which is that it costs next to nothing for them to provide downloads to existing owners, because they presumably have the digital distribution infrastructure for new sales.

In any case, hosting archival versions is not free, it incurs a cost, just like printing, mailing, and postage does for a hard copy of a book. The cost is possibly less, but not 0.

If you think there is a threshold for when a company should cover the costs of negligent loss versus not covering those costs, what is it? Why is the cost of shipping a replacement cost of a physical media above that cost, and the cost of hosting a server in perpetuity below that cost?

New sales are for different versions than what he purchased. Filezilla sells a perpetual license with updates for a year. They just keep the most up to date version on the download server and cut off your access after a year.

In order to implement what you are suggesting they would have to build an entire application that knows when your support ended and serve the specific build that you are licensed for, or provide that ability to their CS team. The reality is that the cost of developing and maintaining that minimal functionality are far from free, probably not too dissimilar from the cost of replacing physical copies of books at a unit level, tbh.

While, yes, it would be generous for Filezilla to provide perpetual support and downloads, that is not what was offered or purchased. They provided software, they supported it for a year, they even allow him to use their customer support resources outside of that time.

Under what moral system is there an imperative to do something that is beyond what you originally agreed to in an anonymous purchase?

At the end of the day, all this spilled ink is about a ~$13 license. Sorry, but a years old $13 purchase carries precisely no implied moral imperative for perpetual availability.