Microsoft open-sources Zork trilogy
Plus: A helping hand for OpenHands, Valdi makes native UI a snap, and more
Hi folks,
The lead story this week is Microsoft’s move to open-source the original Zork trilogy, giving a glimpse into one of the formative codebases of early home computing and a notable moment in software preservation.
Elsewhere, there’s fresh funding for OpenHands’ open source coding agents, a long-running internal UI framework from Snap steps into the open, plus more!
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
Stick a Zork in it!
Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III under the MIT License, working in partnership with Activision and the Internet Archive.
Originally developed by a group of MIT students in the late 1970s who went on to form Infocom, Zork became one of the most influential text-adventure series of the early home-computer era. Infocom was acquired by Activision in 1986, and the rights to the trilogy eventually passed to Microsoft as part of its 2023 acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
The newly opened repositories contain the raw source code, documentation and build instructions for all three titles. The games were built for the “Z-Machine,” a virtual environment that allowed a single story file to run across many different platforms — an approach that made Zork unusually portable for its time.
Crucially, the release covers only the code and related materials; trademarks and packaging assets remain with their owners. The intent, Microsoft says, is to make the games available for study and preservation, serving as a reference point for how a major commercial title of the early 1980s was structured, rather than to reintroduce the series commercially.
“Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it,” Microsoft wrote.
Read more: Microsoft blog
Patch notes
A hefty helping hand for OpenHands
OpenHands has raised $18.8 million in a Series A round of funding. The Boston-based company offers an open source platform for cloud-based coding agents that integrates into enterprise environments with model-agnostic and multi-IDE support.
Read more: OpenHands blog
Valdi makes native UI a Snap
Snapchat-parent Snap has open-sourced Valdi, a cross-platform UI framework that lets developers write interfaces in TypeScript and compile them directly into native views on iOS, Android and macOS.
Read more: The New Stack
Pionix plants EVerest flag with €8m raise
Pionix, a German e-mobility software company founded in 2021, has raised €8 million in funding to scale its open source stack EVerest, with plans to unify global EV-charging infrastructure. EVerest is hosted by LF Energy, and has contributions from more than 600 individuals across over 70 organisations.
Read more: Pionix blog
Don’t imitate, replicate
Cloudflare announced this week that it’s acquiring Replicate, the company behind an open source tool called Cog, which packages machine-learning models into reproducible containers.
The deal aims to fold this model-execution layer into Cloudflare’s Workers platform and speed up deployment of AI applications at scale.
Read more: Cloudflare blog
And finally…
Solving maintainer burnout with… Cranberry sOSS?
The perennial plight to fund open source maintainers took a seasonal turn this week with the launch of Cranberry sOSS, a limited-run jar of organic cranberry sauce sold to raise money for open source project stewards.
Priced at a somewhat specific $13.37 and produced by Open Source Pledge (and its creator Sentry), all Cranberry sOSS proceeds will go to a publicly listed group of open source maintainers, selected through a model from open source funding platform Thanks.dev.
So… why $13.37? Well, presumably because 1337 is “leet” — a longstanding in-joke in hacker culture where 1337 playfully signals something as “elite,” making it a fittingly nerdy price tag for a fundraiser built around open source.
Read more: Cranberry sOSS & Open Source Pledge