Indic Keyboard wins Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) Award
Popular Indian Language Keyboard to add 5 new languages and 19 new keyboard layouts this year
The Mozilla Open Source Support award this year was given to the Indic Keyboard Project. Jishnu Mohan, the creator and maintainer of the project received this award. The MOSS award under the ‘Global Mission Partners : India’ track is a financial grant for the future developments. Indic Keyboard will be using the funding for development efforts and maintenance.
The privacy aware, free and open source Indic keyboard currently supports 23 Indic languages and 57 layouts. In 2019, 5 new languages and 19 new layouts will be added to the project. This year the Indic keyboard will also add Emoji support, Multilingual dictionary, a Developer library for third party developers and Support for run time permissions.
MOSS supports the Free and Open Source Software movement, with a yearly budget of around USD 3 million. Mozilla’s India-specific programme, which was launched in August 2017 with an allocation of INR 10,000,000, awards individuals based in India, who lead open source or free software projects that boost Mozilla’s mission in a significant way. The winner will receive an amount ranging from INR 125,000 to INR 5,000,000.
Jishnu Mohan started it as personal project in 2013. The Indic Keyboard, with over two million downloads on the Google Play store, is now under an umbrella organisation called Indic Project, which is an initiative of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing.
“Traditionally, free and open source projects are characterised by a slow development process, driven by passionate engineers. Awards such as this will enable the developer to dedicate more time for the project,” says Anivar Aravind, Executive Director of Indic Project at SMC.
“The Open Source nature of the Indic Keyboard also led other developers to use and reference our code in their apps. Indic Keyboard has been the starting point of some of the popular keyboard apps like Azhagi and Chrooma,” read a blog post by the SMC, announcing the prestigious accomplishment.
The Indic Keyboard is a ‘privacy aware’ keyboard for android devices. Since software defined keyboards are the primary source of input for mobile devices, ‘Privacy aware’ keyboards don’t snoop into what is being typed and don’t need an Internet connection for it’s operation.
In the past, the Mozilla Open Source Support award has been given to popular open source projects like Tor, Python Package Index, Harfbuzz, webpack, SecureDrop etc.
Earlier the project has received financial support for development from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) , Government of India , ICFOSS (International Centre for Free and Open Source Software) and Government of Kerala via Swathanthra Malayalam Computing.
