As you'll probably know by now if you've read my previous posts, I work with Microsoft products on a day to day basis. I'm also a huge advocate of Open Source Software (OSS). When many people think of OSS, there are a lot who remember the homebrew days of the 70s and 80s and recoil in horror at the thought of putting anything made by the community on their networks. Obviously, there are some absolute dog pieces of software out there, but there are some that rival anything that can be bought. Some often cited examples are OpenOffice, GIMP, and of course Ubuntu. One that is very rarely mentioned is arguably unrivalled by any commercial product - this is FileZilla.

FileZilla is, in my opinion, the best FTP client on the market. Full stop. From being able to enter and process raw UNIX commands from a file to automatic CHMODing files on upload, it is a complete solution.

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Couple it with the FileZilla FTP server and you have an incredibly powerful file transfer and management solution. The server is currently Windows only, but the client is available for all flavours of Windows, OSX and Linux, with unofficial ports existing for some very esoteric OS's. Some would argue that FTP has had it's day, given the laughable security attached to it. However, the fact remains that if you want to move large amounts of data around the web, it's the protocol of choice. Pop on over to the site, download it and have a play. I'm pretty sure you'll end up with a similar sized corner of your heart reserved for it. If not, well, uninstall it, and remember that it cost you nothing