What Shareware Licences Actually Say
September 2026 · Andrew Nakas
Preserving old software is usually described as a legal grey area, and for commercial titles it is. But a large part of the Macintosh catalogue is not grey at all, and the reason is sitting in a text file inside the software itself, where almost nobody looks.
Shareware was a distribution model, not a payment model
The word suggests "try before you buy", and that is the part everyone remembers. The more important half is the other one: shareware had no publisher, no shelf space and no advertising budget, so the only way it reached anyone was by being copied. Bulletin boards, user group disks, the Info-Mac archive, a colleague's floppy.
That meant copying had to be permitted, explicitly, or the model did not work at all. So shareware authors wrote it down — usually themselves, usually in one or two sentences, often in a file called ReadMe.
Three of them, verbatim
Arashi, a Tempest-like arcade game from 1993 by Juri Munkki and Mike Kelly, puts it in a single line:
ARASHI is freely distributable as long as it is not for profit.
That is the entire licence. The authors also shipped the C source alongside the game, and added that anyone distributing it on CD-ROM might send them a copy — a request, not a condition.
Maelstrom, Ambrosia Software's Asteroids, is more formal and lands in the same place. Its licence grants the user a thirty-day trial and asks for registration beyond that, and then, separately, addresses distribution:
Non-profit distribution of the software is acceptable without prior written notice, providing that the software is not modified in any way, and the complete works of the software are included in the distribution package.
Two conditions, both checkable. Do not modify it; ship the whole thing. Note what that rules out: stripping the registration notice, which a lot of abandonware sites do as a courtesy and which is the one thing this licence names first.
Glypha, John Calhoun's Joust tribute, needs no licence reading at all — he published the source and gave the game away. Same with Glider PRO. When the author is also the publisher, the question of who can consent does not arise.
The distinction that matters
The obligation to register is between the user and the author. The permission to distribute is granted to anybody, in advance, on stated conditions. Those are separate clauses doing separate jobs, and conflating them is what makes people assume shareware is as legally murky as commercial abandonware.
It is not. A commercial title from 1994 whose publisher dissolved is preserved on the practical argument that nobody is left to object. A shareware title from 1994 is distributed on terms its author wrote down and published with the software.
What this site does about it
Every hosted title has a provenance note in the repository recording where the files came from and the reasoning for hosting them, and the build fails without one. For shareware that note quotes the operative clause and says how each condition is met.
The practical consequence is visible the moment you play anything here. Maelstrom opens with Ambrosia's registration notice, and it stays exactly where they put it. It would be trivial to patch out and it would breach the licence that permits the game to be here in the first place. So the notice appears, and the title page says it will and what to click.
There is one condition being watched rather than met. Both licences quoted above say non-profit. This site carries no advertising, so the question is not live — but if that changes, the honest answer is to keep shareware titles out of any ad-carrying layout rather than argue about what "for profit" means. That is written down in the notes too, so it cannot be quietly forgotten.
If you are preserving something yourself
Open the archive before you assume. The licence is usually a plain text file sitting next to the application, it is usually short, and it was usually written by the person who made the thing. On the three titles above it took about ten minutes to read all of them, and it turned "probably fine" into "permitted, on these conditions, in writing".