Standing page
About Shareware Box
Shareware Box covers free software's licences, its plumbing and who pays for it. Five files: the relicensing fights and the forks they produced, the supply chain underneath the whole stack, the funding gap between the software the industry depends on and the people who maintain it, how code actually reaches a machine today, and what happened to the shareware model that came before all of it.
Every entry is built from the public record — a project's own announcement, the OSI's approved-licence list, a CVE record, a foundation's published portfolio, a maintainer's own accounting. Dates, licence names, CVE identifiers and figures are attributed in the sentence that carries them.
The site describes what named projects did and what their licences say. It does not tell a reader what they may do with a piece of software, and it does not distribute software.
How the pages are numbered
Plates and entries are numbered continuously across the site: a plate number identifies a photograph, an entry number identifies a piece within its file. The numbering is the only running mark on the site.