My favorite times during the Kawari: Machine Translated project have, by far, been when I've had an excuse to trawl the internet archive. In, I believe,'start.html', the author mentions
briefly a few pieces of middleware of the time: OpenKEEPS, KLAFT and FUDS. I spent a long time in search of copies of the softwares.
I found OpenKEEPS extremely early on, because the link given in the Kawari documentation was actually still live!
In fact, that link there is the exact same one. OpenKEEPS was lucky, because it happened to make a home on SourceForge, a site still around today.
Not listed in the Kawari documentation was OpenKEEPS predecessor, KEEPS. KEEPS was a closed-source version of OpenKEEPS, and I've yet still to find a copy of it.
KLAFT was intended to be a successor to KEEPS. It began development after the author of KEEPS got many complaints about KEEPS making Kawari miserable to use.
I found out all of that reading the creator of KLAFT's journal, kept on his site. I'd been looking for a link to KLAFT when I found that,
before I knew that the Internet Archive could just let you view every URL for an archived site. I've still yet to find a copy of KLAFT, but it seems that it was never finished.
FUDS was an absolute mystery to me for awhile. Their original site was of no help, and for about a month I thought it was lost just like KLAFT and KEEPS.
But! On a completely different project (a search for an original copy of MAKOTO)... I just happened to find it.
FUDS is a middleware for Phase 7 of Kawari. I hadn't yet found any middleware not for Phase 8 of Kawari (the most recent), so it was very exciting so find it. Purely for its historical value. Also of note, FUDS is based on KEEPS! That's right, one of the other middlewares I couldn't find! So, hopefully, the copies of FUDS I have can give some insight into KEEPS as well.
I haven't done much further investigation into FUDS yet, being more preoccupied with my own middleware, but it's very interesting nonetheless. I haven't found anything on KLAFT, yet, either. However, the finding of FUDS gives me hope.