""Rather than creating new repositories, we're contributing directly to history. In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant," says the announcement co-written by Stacy Hafner (director of the OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (VP of Developer Community at the company)."
"Microsoft gained control of the Zork IP when it acquired Activision in 2022; Activision had come to own it when it acquired original publisher Infocom in the late '80s. There was an attempt to sell Zork publishing rights directly to Microsoft even earlier in the '80s, as founder Bill Gates was a big Zork fan, but it fell through, so it's funny that it still ended up in the same place eventually."
Zork I, Zork II and Zork III have been released under the MIT License, making the original game source code open source. The release covers the sequels and documents the open-source grant. The change resulted from work by Xbox, Activision and Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office. Only the source code was relicensed; packaging, marketing assets and trademarks remain proprietary. Jason Scott collaborated on submitting upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories to add the MIT license. Microsoft acquired Zork's intellectual property with its 2022 purchase of Activision; the code had appeared on GitHub in 2019 without a resolved license.
Read at Ars Technica
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