Inform 7 is now open source

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language, and consists of a core compiler, together with extensions, kits and other resources, a number of outlying tools, and documentation, along with applications presenting the system in a friendly way on MacOS, Windows and Linux. This software had been used extensively since 28 April 2006, but by 2016 its source code was in considerable need of modernisation. In part that was wear-and-tear, but it was also the effect of years of experiment in which the code was often built without a full understanding of the concepts it was groping towards. In early 2016, then, a substantial work of renovation began. That work is now essentially complete, and the first results can be seen. The git repository “GitHub – ganelson/inform: The core software distribution for the Inform 7 programming language.” became public today, presenting the complete source and extensive technical documentation. And with that, the whole system was placed under the highly permissive Artistic License 2.0. This is an open-source licence recognised as such by, for example, the Free Software Foundation. –Graham Nelson, intfiction.org