>Yes, but there is no moral argument for requiring it.
Are you sure you didn't butcher a word here? Yes, Firezilla might be in the clear legally if they told the OP to pound sand, but that's not the same thing as having no "moral argument". In most common law jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal to walk past a drowning child and refuse to save him, even if you'll incur marginal cost (eg. 10 min of your time). However that's not you wouldn't say "there's no moral argument for requiring it"
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. It doesn't make sense for a book publisher to send you new copies after your dog ate your book because postage, ink and paper costs money, and if for whatever reason they have a e-book version, it'll be a pain to authenticate that they actually bought the physical book. None of those excuses work for digital downloads.
Comparing a company that refuses to support a purchase with an expired support term to refusing to save the life of a child? I would argue that refusing to stop the death of a child is not in any way comparable to refusing to go above and beyond on a $13 sale from years ago.
> 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.
>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?
To paraphrase your words, "I would argue that refusing to offer 0.09 cents[1] (that's right, less than 1 cent) worth of bandwidth for legacy downloads not in any way comparable to spending $5 (at least) of postage to mail a book"
[1] 9 cents/GB charged by AWS for egress. Actual cost is likely far lower.
Are you sure you didn't butcher a word here? Yes, Firezilla might be in the clear legally if they told the OP to pound sand, but that's not the same thing as having no "moral argument". In most common law jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal to walk past a drowning child and refuse to save him, even if you'll incur marginal cost (eg. 10 min of your time). However that's not you wouldn't say "there's no moral argument for requiring it"
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. It doesn't make sense for a book publisher to send you new copies after your dog ate your book because postage, ink and paper costs money, and if for whatever reason they have a e-book version, it'll be a pain to authenticate that they actually bought the physical book. None of those excuses work for digital downloads.