Microsoft also points out that the license related only to the source code, and “does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials”.
It’s a welcome move. However, Microsoft’s announcement about making Zork open-source sure has the whiff of AI-generated writing about it. The article is riddled with saccharine, dreamy phrasing and AI-favoured sentence structures. “When Zork arrived, it didn’t just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine” is a classic bit of AI-generated hokum, and similar phrases occur multiple times through the text.
Pretty cool. They are probably hoping someone can figure out how to compile it. The readme states that it can’t be compiled…
Well, the game uses portable bytecode for the ‘Z-machine’ interpreter, and there are dozens of third-party interpreters for it. You can run these games on your phone, no need to compile them.
The repository had been lying dormant for roughly six years.
Did we really need an article saying “I think this other bit of text might be written by a robot”? Of all the things you criticise Microsoft for, that’s the one to go for? Or perhaps it’s the other side of the coin, Microsoft unusually did something quite nice so the author had to find something about it to criticise?
You have been eaten by a Grue.
The press release isn’t really the important part here.
It sounds like a few sixty year old engineer(s) got some managers to sign off the release of the source code and decided to do the most out of the lack of resources they had available. I have no problem with them using AI to write a press release. No one is going to read it anyways in a few weeks of time - but the release is there forever (within reasonable limits).
