The fourth week of September 2008 is almost over, yet we have found some time to write an article on an open source web project, as part of our new Open Source Project of the Week series.

This week’s project, and also the first open source product to be presented on our site, is WinSCP — an open source SFTP and FTP client for Windows.

Since not every reader out there is a techie or a technology fan, we will present this product using a common, natural language, so that both the home user and the might tech savvy understand what exactly is WinSCP and why one should install and use it whenever operating with a FTP server.

What is WinSCP?

WinSCP can refer to two things:

1. a SourceForge open source project;
2. a Windows FTP and SFTP client.

Both of these definitions rely on the idea and sustained effort of Martin Prikryl, a 29 years old Software developer from Prague, the Capital of the Czech Republic.

WinSCP - the SourceForge Open Source Project

It was he who created a new SourceForge project because once he graduated from the University of Economics in Prague, he had lost the hosting access to the University’s server.

Once hosted on SourceForge, which is a large open source portal and community with free registration for open source projects, Martin began working on a SFTP and FTP client for Windows. As we all know, Windows is an operating system developed by the Microsoft Corporation; other than that, some of you might also find it useful to learn that FTP refers to the file transfer protocol (a protocol for transferring files to / from a web server), while SFTP refers to secure file transfer protocol, SSH file transfer protocol, which serves the same purpose but in a secured way.

The WinSCP SourceForge project was started in 2003 and is now hosted at http://sourceforge.net/projects/winscp. According to project founder Martin Prikryl, there are some 400,000 software unique update checks every weeks, meaning that some 400,000 users have already installed the software on their PCs.

WinSCP - the Windows FTP and SFTP client

WinSCP, the result of Martin’s SourceForge project, is a software application for Windows operating system. It allows the user to connect either in the traditional or secured way to a web server via the file transfer protocol, in order to upload or download files to/from the server.

The original description of the WinSCP Windows client is the following:

WinSCP is a SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol.

The software can be installed for free on either one of the following operating systems:

• 32-bit MS Windows (95/98)
• 32-bit MS Windows (NT/2000/XP)
• All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP)
• Win2K
• WinXP

and is available in a multitude of languages, including: Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.

As you can see for yourselves, WinSCP cannot be installed on a Microsoft Vista operating system; however, this issue will undoubtedly be solved in the near future.

As of today, September the 26th 2008, the current version of WinSCP is 4.1.6, with the last software update being performed on July the 30th, 2008.

Here are some quicklinks: WinSCP Sourceforge project page, WinSCP official site, WinSCP download area (on SourceForge).