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Comment by joefreeman | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: the latest version of this software uses SwiftKey under the hood - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-... (Disclaimer: I used to work for SwiftKey)

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As a loyal SwiftKey on Android user, the prediction engine for SwiftKey is unnervingly good. Glad to see it's put to a better use than helping me write Facebook and HN posts.

It begs the question though, why isn't there a proper SwiftKey keyboard for Windows? The OSK on 8.1 is awful compared to SwiftKey on Android. The Windows 10 is a improvement, but I'd still pay for a better one.

Have they improved performance of SwiftKey? I had the paid version for years, was even a VIP (won a t-shirt and everything), but I switched off last year in favor of Fleksy as a faster, more lightweight alternative.

I think the performance of Swiftkey improved about half a year ago. But I think around the same time I started noticing a significant drop in Swiftkey's accuracy. It "feels" less accurate to me than it was, although I use it with 3 enabled languages at once and I imagine that also brings lower accuracy by default. Still, I think it has become quite a bit worse than before, and I worry they did that on purpose as a compromise to improve performance.

Was a loyal user. Then they started making themes, emojis and all those bells and whistles and thrusting it all in the app which made it really slow and bulky.

Does this mean that SwiftKey is now open source, that what they've open-sourced doesn't include the actual prediction engine, or that what they've open-sourced is not the latest version? The GitHub page says they use Presage.

Interesting, since Presage is GPL 2 but this project is Apache licensed. Intel says "Integration with Presage is through the Windows Communication Framework" which I guess is a roundabout way of avoiding the GPL?

The Apache license v2 is GPL-compatible, which was actually one of the major reasons for having a v2.

Apache licensed code can be included in a GPL project, not the other way around. If the project includes any GPL code, the whole thing is GPL.

I think it is better to think of it from the perspective that this code and this project is Apache, but any binaries that result from linking this code to that code are under GPL.

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