NcFTPd Server may be used free of charge for personal use or at institutions of higher education! All we ask is that you consider us when you need a FTP server solution in a commercial setting.
The 3-User Personal License option for NcFTPd Server is available for home users and non-commercial sites who want NcFTPd's rock-solid security and performance features.
To take advantage of the free personal license option, all you need to do is set the general.cf configuration option max-users to 3 or less (example: max-users=3) and restart NcFTPd. No further configuration or registration is necessary.
You may not use this option in a commercial setting even if the 3-user limit is sufficient for your business needs. Please support the project by purchasing a license if you need to use NcFTPd at your place of business.
To qualify for the Free Unlimited-User Educational License, your server machine must have a standard educational domain name (.edu, .ac.uk, etcetera). NcFTPd recognizes your educational domain and automatically runs in fully-registered mode free of charge. No further configuration or registration is necessary.
The most common educational domains are listed below:
There are many other educational domains that are also recognized, such as universities in Canada, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Brazil, etc. In fact, most countries' university domains should be recognized automatically, especially if the country has a standard naming convention.
To find out if your school's domain is recognized, you'll need to download and install NcFTPd and then check the FTP connection message, i.e.:
ksh$ /usr/bin/ftp localhost Connected to localhost. 220-localhost NcFTPd Server (free educational license) ready.
You can also check to see what NcFTPd thinks your primary hostname is (which includes your domain name) by invoking NcFTPd with the -e flag, i.e.:
ksh$ ./ncftpd -e pikachu.Nintendo.co.jp
If you don't see the message "free educational license" in the FTP login banner, then your machine did not qualify, and you need to purchase a license. Sorry, no exceptions because we require that the free licenses be detected automatically to avoid administrative overhead on our part. However, if your university or country's educational domain system is not recognized, please send us an e-mail so we can support you in a later release of the software.