Montmorency wrote:I have no axe to grind either way in the Lingq vs LWT discussions/competition, but my understanding was that one of Lingq's major beef's against LWT was that people were taking actual
content from Lingq and then using it on LWT. I think at one time they were allegedly alleging
that the LWT author was actually encouraging people to do this. That's potentially a much bigger issue than the software "inspiration", I think. Even if a lot of the content was public domain (not sure if it was or not), the Lingq team had actually gone to the trouble of putting it together and making it available to their members.
Well you can't have it both ways. They advertise free downloadable content and then are disappointed when users prefer to use another tool to work with it. And most of the content was created with no financial compensation, just for the points that expire if you don't use them (no idea if they still do). The content was a bait. Nobody forced them to provide it and they should've been aware that people will always be more willing to check out the free stuff than to pay.
Besides, I assume the lwt posts weren't random. They were probably in response to frustration and technical issues of existing users. Basically if the only thing you like about LingQ is the content, what is wrong with using it elsewhere? Or do you also consider it problematic to add your LingQ vocab/examples to an existing Anki deck?
IDK, to me that's the equivalent of creating and publishing knitting patterns for Harry Potter scarves or providing DIY instructions for other merchandise.
Also, as far as I remember, you can only upload public content on LingQ. So unlike LWT you can't use it with copyrighted content you've legally purchased, or anything personal you don't want to share with the world. I'm not sure the alleged encouragement was more than just pointing out that you can put anything into LWT because your content isn't public, and you can run it on your own machine so LWT has no clue what you put into it. (I'm sorry if I messed up in this paragraph - I did check if the LingQ site says anything about that, but found nothing)
Though to be fair I could be defending LingQ now, if only they'd had European Portuguese content when I signed up, or if they had clearly indicated having only Brazilian content. I'm not perfect