To the forum admins

[Dave Hicks]

Well this has been a strange sequence of events. Let's review:

You posted a link to a manual that you had altered. Walter asked for a Moderator to be a copyright judge. A moderator came along and mostly sided with you. I also thought it seemed reasonable to ASSUME that a manual included with a GPL'd package was GPL'd if not otherwise marked. (Though I am not a lawyer and GPL typically confuses me.) Some others disagreed. I was going to suggest that the best thing to do in such cases is ask permission. I've asked permission for things which were GPL'd and the response has usually been: sure – great – thanks for asking!

We shut down the thread when the legal back and forth was getting nowhere and more of these strange personality/nationality type references started appearing.

I would think that from your standpoint, things had gone reasonably well.

But you threw a fit and asked that your account be closed, and you deleted all the posts you ever made. This caused me to be curious and start looking at your old posts and I discovered that you had asked for permission more than a month ago and were denied. And so… you did it anyway. Now that might have been a valid strategy if you had carefully worked out the details with your lawyer, but instead it was presented here in a public forum where a bunch of non-lawyers got to debate the topic with varying degrees of prior information, legal knowledge, assumptions etc. I don’t see how you could have expected a reaction any different than what you received.

It does sound like you should take a break from this forum. We are here to talk about calculators, not to fight your legal battles for you.