Now Zork belongs to MS. Release it under MIT and everyone would win a great history of gaming (and the right to create new histories in the Zorkverse without worrying).
Spiritwrak it's a good example.
In case of anyone says "text adventures have no future"... the folk lore from a distant past made Disney rich. The Arturian legends plus some samurai touches set into a futuristic space made George Lucas and Lucasfilms loaded, too.
I think Microsoft might be willing to release the Infocom build tools and engines under an MIT license – by now they would be of purely historical interest, similar to open-sourcing MS-DOS 1.0 and 2.0.
I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do so for the game assets (the room/item descriptions/etc) – it would remove one of the main legal barriers to a competitor creating their own game set in the Zork universe. The Fortran 77 version of Zork has long been available under a "non-commercial use only" license, so they might be willing to release the game assets under such a license too (or maybe a more modern equivalent such as CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-SA)
> We already have build tools for infocom against the Z-Machine
The TOPS-20 versions of ZILCH (and ZAP) don't seem to be available.
The ITS version of ZILCH from MIT has been recovered, but (from what I understand) it is an earlier version, and the TOPS-20 version which Infocom used later isn't publicly available, and that later version had added features.
In any case, its copyright status is murky, Microsoft could clean up that murkiness.
