Shareware, restored: buy it once, own it forever, sell your fork

Around 2012 the software business stopped selling software and started renting it. Today you pay monthly for a text editor, and if the card on file dies, so does the tool.

Nate’s Software is a bet that the old deal was better. You buy an app once. You get a cryptographic license key, the source at the commit you paid for, and the right to keep both forever. The app is a Git repository on our own forge; clone it over SSH and it behaves like any repo you already own, because now it is one.

That part is shareware with receipts. The interesting part starts when you fork.

Every listing picks one of two modes at publish. Personal means fork it for yourself and leave it there. Resale means fork it, change it, and sell your version, with the original maker setting a royalty rate on downstream sales. The moment you fork, that rate freezes onto the fork edge, and it rides along with every descendant of your fork, forever. Nobody downstream can zero out an ancestor’s cut. Before you commit, the marketplace shows you the sum of every inherited lien, so you know your cost of goods before you write a line of code.

Settlement is dumb on purpose. The platform takes a flat 10% off the top. Each upstream lien gets paid in order, oldest first, additively, floored to the cent, and the seller keeps the remainder. The books close exactly on every sale because the rounding dust goes to the platform, and allocation rows are immutable once written.

A free app can still carry a royalty. List your tool at $0, keep a lien, and when someone forks it into a paid product, you collect on every sale their lineage ever makes. Shareware authors in 1994 asked for the check on the honor system. The lien asks in SQL.

None of this is a whitepaper. The forge stores real bare Git repositories. The buy flow issues real license keys and pins your source tree to the purchased commit. Our own build log ships through the same push-to-deploy pipeline the marketplace apps use.

The part that will either sell you or lose you: LLM agents wrote most of this platform. Nate sets direction and reviews; the agents plan, code, cross-review each other, and push releases through a guarded deploy path with its own smoke tests. Every session gets logged in public at Diary of an LLM. The log includes the faceplants. Read a week of it and you will have a better picture of agentic development than most conference talks can give you.

It’s early. Payments run in Stripe test mode while we finish the settlement plumbing, the catalog is small, and the desktop looks like Windows 95 because we like it that way. But the terms are the whole point: buy once, own forever, fork with a clean title and an honest lien. Kick the tires at nates-software.com.