Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
It would also be interesting why it was open-sourced now. I assume if they had done the same last year, the resulting loss of revenue would not have destroyed the plucky little $3T upstart.
The source code Scott & co. released is word-for-word exactly the same as the pirated source code that's been floating around the Internet since at least 2009, and that pagetable.com wrote about in 2018:
This is what Microsoft slapped a license and an AI-slop README on. Sure, they can legally do that, they still own the copyright, but it's still pretty funny that they're essentially laundering pirated software.
The Zork I/II/III releases were even more blatant, with git commits adding license texts to existing pirate (or, if you prefer, archival) releases of the old source code:
It makes me wonder how many of Microsoft's other releases of old source code are laundered pirate releases, but I don't want to be too harsh. Microsoft's actions in these cases are considerably nicer than, say, what Warner Bros. did about pirated Mortal Kombat 2 source code (takedown), or Nintendo's continued legal hostility toward everyone everywhere. Maybe other companies could learn not to be so dog-in-the-manger about their precious Intellectual Property.
No, there was a big post somewhere on the previous release two weeks ago of the DOS source showing just how incredibly hard of a challenge it was to properly input/OCR all the reams of source was.
This source is a lot smaller, but still annoying if they had to type it all in or OCR it.