Zork on MIT

I ain't got much, but I can at least link Zork. That's the 1-3 series, which some nerds did in the late 1970s and then sold, via their "Infocom" brand. Until Infocom fell down went boom. Lately the present holders of the property are Microsoft which property they've now released to some sort of public domain, here MIT's.

Go click the link to see the peregrinations of Infocom's intellectual-property, if you care. I'm not sure I care. Reason? It's just the Z-machine. We've had interactive-fiction on the Z-machine, by hobbyists for free, since the middle 1990s. I was unaware anybody was enforcing that copyright. Could they enforce it?

Microsoft do retain a hold on Zork's lore, like the Flathead history and the Borphee / Pheebor alluvial plain. Which is fine. I hope Microsoft can use it, to put out a game as good as Zork Grand Inquisitor was good. Do so with my blessing and please take my money.

But rights to the code, legally, seems like a dead-letter to me. Probably to Microsoft too since said code's been on github since 2019 (before MS bought the rights). This was 1970s code, overtaken by events in the 1990s. Just an artifact of computer history.