I'm pretty sure David meant "the technical details are pretty serious, because they prevent the game from being recompiled and run from the source. Thus they prevent one possible goal of making the game open source: having more people play the game".
That being said, I'm not entirely sure if that's a valid reason. The original scripting language used to write the game may be dead, but that doesn't mean people couldn't port at least part of the code to a more recent language. You could, say, take all the commands used in the scripts, write equivalent functions in a programming language of your choice, and then do a search/replace on the original files. Whether or not this is feasible depends on how many different commands were used, how easily their functions can be dechipered, and how much time people are interested in devoting to this project.
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