Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
I've never used FSP, so I'll leave it to the FSP FAQ to explain why FSP is so wonderful in comparison to FTP.
From the user's point of view, the differences are not that great, except that some of the more annoying features of FTP are gone. Here are the main differences. a. The protocol can stand things going down: if the server or the network falls over in the middle of a transfer, you can just wait until it comes back up. You don't have to reconnect, and even better, if the server went down 90% through grabbing a file, you can continue from where you left off. b. The protocol doesn't need a username or password. You just throw packets at the server. You don't have to identify yourself (though you're not completely anonymous). c. It's harder to kill off a site with an FSP server than with an FTP server. The FSP daemon is designed to be as lightweight as possible: it doesn't fork off any sub-processes, and it takes steps to limit the amount of traffic it handles. d. The user interface is completely different. The interface that comes with the package consists of eleven commands that you can call from the shell. In effect, your shell is providing all the nice functions like command line editing. This makes the interface much more versatile than FTP's. e. FSP is a bit slower than FTP. This is a feature, not a bug. The point is to keep the communication lightweight, and not to flood the Net.Discussion about the implementation and usage of FSP takes place on the Usenet newsgroup alt.comp.fsp. You can get a current list of FSP sites by fingering charro@bode.ee.ualberta.ca.