After quite some while we are happy to release Maliit 2. Thanks for all the support to this release.
Maliit Framework
Not much has happened since our 0.99.2 release. Marius Gripsgard and Andrés B.S. fixed a few things around pkgconfig. At the stable state Maliit is, we think it’s fair to assume that the next big changes will be the eventual port from Qt 5 to Qt 6 (not that we mind getting suprised with pull requests adding features before that). We will also look at supporting new Wayland Input Method protocols See the Wayland Protocols - Input Method Hub.
Maliit Keyboard
This release is a bit more exciting. Our last Keyboard release was 0.99.1 as part of the maliit-plugins bundle way back in 2015. Then Canonical came and forked the source code to build a virtual keyboard for Ubuntu Touch, made some improvements, and then went away again because they discontinued Ubuntu Touch. Nevertheless, their work was valuable enough to use it as base for further improvements and bringing the code back into the Maliit fold. From 2017 until somewhat recently, Jan Arne worked pretty much by himself on improvements such as removing deprecated Ubuntu Touch dependencies, porting the code from QMake to CMake, and so on. More recently the good folks at KDE looked for a new on-screen keyboard, though, and send in a few pull requests.
With KDE and their Plasma project moving to Maliit, Linux distributions want proper releases of dependencies as well, so here it is.
Where can I get it?
- framework: maliit-framework-2.0.0.tar.gz
- keyboard: maliit-keyboard-2.0.0.tar.gz
What is it?
Maliit provides a flexible and cross-platform input method framework. It has a plugin-based client-server architecture where applications act as clients and communicate with the Maliit server via input context plugins. Maliit is an open source framework (LGPL 2.1 or later) and an open source on-screen keyboard (LGPL 3.0 only).
Maliit is being used by KDE for Plasma, LG for webOS, UBPorts, LuneOS, Sailfish OS, and likely others.
Visit maliit.github.io for more information about the project.
Call for contributions
Maliit’s website could benefit from a little love. Some of the information is no longer up to date. If anybody out there has some time to spare to fix it up a little bit, hop to https://github.com/maliit/maliit.github.io and send us a pull request.
Should anybody with some influence at Canonical happen to read this announcement: We have nothing against the LGPL 3.0 but we’d like some consistency in our licensing. Maliit Keyboard was originally BSD-licensed but Canonical code from 2014 until 2017 is licensed under LGPL-3.0-only. If Canonical could send us a PR replacing the LGPL 3.0 headers with BSD ones, we’d appreciate it.
We currently lack the manpower to crawl through various forks of Maliit Framework and Keyboard. We’re aware of them and we totally support the right of anybody to fork all Free Software code but not always is new code in those forks specific to custom implementations. A helping hand or two that ports improvements useful for our upstream code would, again, be very appreciated.