Dear users!

1. We have found fake products in the Internet naming themselves Free Download Manager (speed-downloading.com, for instance). Such products may be harmful and infected with viruses, spyware etc. That is why we recommend you to beware of them and download FDM only from our site.

2. FDM is a GPL product; therefore any person can use its code to develop GPL (note, only GPL) products. But in doing so nobody possesses a right to use our brand – Free Download Manager/FDM – and its stylistics. It is illegal to play such products off FDM and/or develop non-GPL products using FDM codes.

Does www.freedownloadmanager.com qualify as a fake? To me it's a legitimate download manager that happens to have the same name.

another asking about this site.

well one thing is freedownloadmanager seems to be a pretty generic name. might i suggest changing the name of this project to something more unique? (=

I definitely second this!

yeah and what's next? changing the name from firefox (again) to something "more unique" just because some smart head thinks it could be a good idea to use this well known name to guide more people to their own site.

in case of freedownloadmanager.com it's pretty lame from these reget.com people. is their product really that bad that they need such tricks?

anyway, i guess umbra were talking about real fakes, not copy cats.

Is it safe to download Free Download Manger from www.download.com ?

Yes.

_________________
Alex,
FDM development team

well, freedownloadmanager.com is ok.
Reget.com is a well-known Russian software developer. Their download manager is famous and more popular in Russia than FDM. But it is a commercial product with close source. In fact, free version exclusivly for Russia and CIS exists, but it is just a beta. So it is strange that they bought this domain name.

How's about postimg the CRC, etc. for the download at www.freedownloadmanager.org on thje downloads page and here?

As long as www.freedownloadmanager.com is not offering anything, we cannot consider it infringing. Should anybody venture to use that site to benefit from our name, we shall claim its illegality.

i personally like the name. i've been using this program for a while now and it works absolutely great! thanks!

So what about Digital signature for orginal FDM??
PGP, x509 or at least MD5 SHA1 etc

The audience that's likely to end up downloading a fake version of FDM is clearly not well conversant with stuff like PGP, MD5 and SHA1. Hell, I'm a pro and *I* still don't know what x509 is

I agree with this.

The first time I heard about FDM (several years ago), I was going to dismiss it as just another download manager such as "Internet Download Manager" which was crap. That time, my favorite was Mass Downloader which I had been using for several years. Still, I love to experiment and consequently have an opinion on things, so I decided to try out FDM. And boy, was I surprised!

Older versions of FDM were a little less feature-ful when compared to Mass Downloader, so I didn't switch to it completely, but since version 2.x, FDM has replaced MD on all my systems and my friend's systems too. I've become quite an FDM evangelist since then. It's one of the first apps I install on a new system.

Long story, but what I'm trying to say is that if I wasn't the experimenting types, I'd never have downloaded a product that has "Free" and its purpose making up the whole name of the product. Free Video Encoder? No, thanks. Free Music Player? Nah. Free Operating System? LOL, No way.



Shall we have a thread where people can suggest some new names for FDM? If we all like and agree on a good one, maybe we can ask the developers to consider changing the name!

- Aalaap