[cstross]

I can't find the bibliographic details for the 2013 edition, but the 1992 one was published by Addison-Wesley, so it's quite possible that anyone participating in this project to "liberate" the text will get a cease-and-desist from Pearson Plc's legal department/anti-piracy people.

Caveat: the 2013 edition doesn't seem to be available via Amazon so may well be formally out of print. In which case, Wirth's heirs can issue a rights reversion letter to Addison-Wesley and claw the rights back, then relicense the text libre. Or they may already have other plans for re-issuing the book.

Either way, it'd be polite to ask first before "liberating".

[dchest]

The book and software is under the MIT-like license https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/license.txt

[cstross]

That's a good starting place, then.

(It's still polite to ask/let the heirs know what you're doing.)

[kragen]

wirth has published his project under an open-source license, guaranteeing everyone everywhere the freedom to study, copy, modify, and redistribute it forever

you're suggesting offering his heirs the opportunity to revoke that license

how can you possibly think this is a good idea? if it became a widespread practice, it would result in a million lawsuits like the sco lawsuit, utterly destroying free software. is that what you want?