Apparently WordStar has not been released for free by the owners (as Word 5.5 for DOS was), it's just been unilaterally packaged by a fan hoping not to get in trouble.
> It's not clear to us who owns the intellectual property. We doubt it's one of the surviving offshoots, today's Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but it could be another offshoot, Software MacKiev.
Whereas this release is made by writer Robert J. Sawyer, who does not appear to be affiliated with any of the potential owners.
Edit: Even though The Register calls this a free re-release, Sawyer himself just calls it an archive: https://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=5806
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#WordStar_2000
If ML would make it much easier to clone software UX, make that kind of task accessible to non-programmer users—then, all power to the users. I'm in solidarity with users. I'm in solidarity with their wish to configure their text-editing software to look and feel exactly as they want it. This shouldn't be the sole province of Emacs priests; if people of the future can do all that magic, not with dozens of hours of Lisp hacking, but with a flick of an LLM wand—the world is that much a better, richer, place for the human species.
There is if you literally use the code for that software to build your clone, either directly or through an LLM trained on it, which is my remark implied. Even cloning the entire featureset of a software is problematic...
> If ML would make it much easier to clone software UX, make that kind of task accessible to non-programmer users—then, all power to the users
This is a contortion. Certainly the core of what you say is true -- but for that what you need is free software, either by political encouragement or by law. Not by making up a loophole where only a certain subset of rube goldberg machines are free to violate copyright but normal users are not. You end up in a world where the Lisp hacker cannot modify his word processor, but the guy with the LLM "can". The ridiculousness of such scenario is precisely what I wanted to point with my sarcasm.