FTP host does client have to have software to

Heres my question, If I am the host and I want to let others download files from my server. Do the people downloading need the software as well?

If you want to share files by using the FTP method you really should rethink the protocol. There are better solutions for general P2P file sharing out there (BitTorrent, Direct Connect).

To let people browse through your files from almost anywhere you can set up a FTP server (wish there was SmartFTPServer).

Users can then connect and browse through the mounted directories.

To give a user a file via FTP you only need to make a link like this:

Anonymous access to file mysecrets.txt on path /secret
ftp://ftp.yourserver.com/secret/mysecrets.txt

You know the guy and let him do everything:
ftp://myfriend:leet@ftp.yourserver.com/ ... ecrets.txt

where "myfriend" is username and "leet" is the password.

Most browsers understand this syntax and a lot of file browsers (Nautilus and Windows Explorer via IE core) also support it by using Virtual File System techniques.