The IFDC FileGate Project is a free distribution system, which delivers over 11 megabytes of shareware and freeware files a day to main distribution systems all over the world, at no cost for the receiving system. This distribution system is made possible by a collaboration of IFDC File Distribution Coordinators and 3Com.
Originally the brainchild of Terence Milbourn, Janis Kracht and Ray Kaliss, the FileGate project was first meant to link the United States and the United Kingdom by having 3Com pick up files in North America from File Distribution Network (FDN) Coordinators, and having 3Com deliver them to the United Kingdom. Further international distribution to include all major continents of the world was developed by Janis Kracht, Coordinator of the Programmers Distribution Network, and Adam Strack, of 3Com USA as an outgrowth of the success of the US <-> UK connection.
The purpose of the FileGate Project is to make shareware and freeware files available to end-users and bulletin board systems world-wide.
There are a number of file distribution schemes for getting files into the hands of end-users. Each of these schemes has communities of users it serves well, and each has communities of users it misses completely. The IFDC FileGate came into being not to compete with these distribution methods, but to feed files into all of these channels and to widen that distribution throughout the world.