LingQ and Learning with Texts

What is the official relationship of LingQ with the recent take-down of the FLOSS web-app “Learning With Texts”? ( LWT - Learning with Texts download | SourceForge.net )

Will LingQ become the new author-maintainer of Learning with Texts and, more importantly, will the code be re-released under its original open-source license?

[Update]
Also FLTR (Foreign Language Text Reader)

Whatever is happening has nothing to do with us.

3 Likes

Okay.

The projects are both citing legal issues.

Has LingQ received any legal threat? It’s possible this is the work of patent-trolls in search of easy extortion money.

It seems a stretch to me. I suspect the projects got tired of maintaining their service for free. I’m not sure there’s anything patentable. It’s reading and listening.

:slight_smile: Check the history and definition of “patent troll.” The (U.S.) patent office has been extremely lax in the last two decades when it comes to denial of obtuse or overly broad or common-sense patent applications.

Also, if they got tired of maintaining their code, that is all well and good. The license, however, puts the code into the public domain and if they were merely ceasing development work, they likely would have left it up at sourceforge. LWT, in particular, has an active support history as recent as 2020-09-18; although the support-forum also has been taken down and this can only be inferred from the project history published automatically by sourceforge on the project summary page.

The projects both cite legal dispute. That is not simple abandonment due to boredom or disinterest.