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Comment by pm215 | Hacker News Reader

The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:

"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."

This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.

(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)

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Yeah the code was leaked without Activision's permission a few years ago. It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog. The other games haven't been available for sale since the mid 90s when Activision put out a shovelware CD collection containing every Infocom game except Hitchhiker's and Shogun, so it's not like they have much commercial value.

> It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog.

Likely explanation: their lawyers are worried there may be third party rights or agreements limiting their ability to open source a game – even if that isn't true, lawyers want to see paperwork to convince themselves it isn't true. For Zork, that was comparatively easy because the game's history is well-known, and Activision had a history of releasing sequels. For other games, that may be more difficult – so start with the lowest hanging and highest profile fruit.

Yeah, they probably started with what was easiest/oldest/most iconic with the clearest copyright history/ownership record.

In at least one of the above mentioned cases, we do know that the current rights holder and/or most recent licensee appears to be the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...

The BBC probably has a say in if that game will be open source. (Their multi-decade effort at making the game free to play and being open about some of their enhancements to it suggests they may be willing to help with that, and Microsoft making the first move with Zork 1/2/3 may help with any interest there.)

The rights to Hitchhiker's and Shogun reverted to their credited authors (Douglas Adams and James Clavell) after they went out of print. The rest of the Infocom library was created as works for hire entirely by salaried Infocom employees, so the rights went from Infocom to Activision to Microsoft.

Right, which is why I assume the BBC has the entire rights today to Hitchhiker's and was gifted them by Douglas Adams' estate, but my searches didn't turn up enough evidence to back that assumption so I didn't include it, but I feel rather sure of it. (ETA: Related to the chain of how the BBC wound up owning was left of the H2G2 wiki for a time before spinning that back out to different owners.)

I really enjoyed that Activision "shovelware" cd. For a time it made up a large part of my (Linux) game collection. It is not leaving my collection.

I bought a version for the mac (OSX), which I managed to get moved from 800k floppy to my network drive. The games are still on my NAS today and play just fine. Still fun to play, someday I hope to find time to solve them. I keep the originals so should even be legal.

Just noticed (too late to edit), this was a pre-OSX mac version. m68k I believe.

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