It appears that the #NewYorkTimes has killed #PhoNZErdle, whose site https://intro2psycholing.net/PhoNZErdle_daily/ now says "Unfortunately PhoNZErdle has had to be removed because of copyright issues raised by the New York Times".
Why!? It didn't use the same answers as the NYT version of #Wordle. It didn't use the same list of allowable words. I don't think it used any proprietary source code from Wordle. Heck, it didn't even use the same alphabet!
Is the NYT trying to legally and culturally appropriate all mastermind-like word games? Including much older variants like Jotto and Lingo?
What claim can they possibly have?
So it turns out (unsurprisingly) it's not just #PhoNZErdle they've come for. https://www.404media.co/nytimes-files-copyright-takedowns-against-hundreds-of-wordle-clones/ (Warning: the linked page contains a quotation that includes a vulgar word used by the primary target of the #NewYorkTimes's #Wordle derivatives takedown notice.)
The #NYT's claim is made a bit more explicit there: "The Times’s Wordle copyright includes the unique elements of its immensely popular game, such as the 5x6 grid, green tiles to indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles to indicate the correct letter but the wrong place within the word, and the keyboard directly beneath the grid."
Comparing the features mentioned here to those of #Lingo, it seems that the claim is based on:
giving the player six turns instead of only five, and
using green, instead of red.They also mention the on-screen keyboard, but I'm pretty sure I'd seen one or two on-screen keyboards at the bottom of smartphone screens long before Wordle was invented.
Now I'm no lawyer, but here's an actual expert in #copyright and internet law preemptively rebutting the NYT's claims just over two years ago: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/24/wordle-kind-of-rips-off-lingo-a-copyright-lawyer-says-thats-ok.html
@TMakarios can someone link me to an #opensource #wordle clone I can host on my server. Bonus points if it has no server-side requirement (or uses PHP for server-side requirement)
@zachdecook
His much of a clone are you looking for? Like, there's a spectrum from having the same answers as the New York Times #Wordle on the same days, through to variants in different languages, or with different rules.
In between is, for example, #Reactle, which has the same rules, but each day's answer is unrelated to the NYT answer for the day. (I think Reactle was the primary target of the takedown notice.) It's been ported to #WebXDC, so it doesn't even really need a host in that form; people can just share it via email using #DeltaChat, or via #XMPP using #Cheogram or #monocles.
If you're willing to host multiple variants, I'm guessing there are probably hundreds, of maybe even thousands, of projects that need a new home.