About
What Obadh is, and where it came from
A free Bangla keyboard, and the twenty-year-old idea it continues.
In short
- Today
- iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 or later. Mac on macOS 15 or later.
- Not yet
- Linux, Android, Windows and ChromeOS. Nobody has started any of the four, and one of them could be yours.
- Price
- Free to use. No ads, nothing to sign in to.
- License
- MIT, throughout. Engine 0.9.1, apps 0.1.0.
- Built by
- Unmukto, an open source collective.
Where it came from
For about fifteen years, writing Bangla on a computer meant buying software and learning a layout first. What you produced was font-encoded text, readable only on a machine carrying the same proprietary font. Then one student changed that.
- 26 March 2003
Mehdi Hasan Khan, a medical student at Mymensingh Medical College, releases the first version of what became Avro Keyboard. The 26th of March is Independence Day in Bangladesh.
- 21 April 2003
The name Avro arrives, with version 0.9.0. Rifat Un Nabi, Tanbin Islam Siam and Shabab Mustafa carry the credit with him. They publish as OmicronLab, a handful of people and not a company.
- The years after
Avro cost nothing, wrote Unicode, and let you type by sound. A generation learned to write its language that way and never learned a layout at all.
- February 2025
The Ekushey Padak in science and technology goes to all four of them for Avro. It was announced for Mehdi Hasan Khan alone; he asked for it to name the other three, and the ministry made it a joint award.
ভাষা হোক উন্মুক্ত Obadh’s line adds one word to that. It is not a rewrite of Avro and not a fork: no shared code, and a Roman scheme of its own, written down in the guide with a section for people arriving with Avro habits. Nobody from OmicronLab has any part in this, and nothing here is their endorsement.
What it takes from Avro is the premise: the way you write your own language should not be something you buy, and should not be something anyone can take back.
Why it never guesses
Type a word nobody has ever written down (your friend’s name, your village, a line of Nazrul in the spelling of 1922) and Obadh still gets it right, the same way every time.
The layer that turns Roman into Bangla holds no dictionary at all. kt becomes ক্ত because a rule says a consonant meeting a consonant binds, and that rule is a file in the repository with tests over it. Corrections are a separate layer, and they only ever offer; nothing is inserted for you unless you switch that on.
The name
অবাধ, romanized obadh, means unhindered. Nobody coined it for this: অবাধে is how you say that something happens freely, with nothing in its way.
Type obadhe bangla likhun into the engine and it gives অবাধে বাংলা লিখুন.
Who builds it
The license
MIT, throughout. Use Obadh for anything including work you are paid for, read the source, change it, ship your own version; keep the copyright notice on any copy you pass on, and expect no warranty.
The part that matters is not the price. If this project stopped tomorrow, everything needed to keep it alive is already in the hands of anyone who wants it.
ভাষা হোক আরও উন্মুক্ত