This is wonderful news, and my sincere thanks to the author. I remember coming upon this algorithm several years ago, and thinking it was extremely elegant and very appealing, but being disappointed by the patent status making it unusable for FOSS work. I really appreciate the author's choice to dedicate it to the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, and congratulations on the success it had while proprietary!

Now if I ever get around to writing that terminal emulator for fun, I'll be tempted to do it with this algorithm for the code's aesthetic appeal.

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olejorgenb 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I was granted a patent for the Slug algorithm in 2019, and I legally have exclusive rights to it until the year 2038. But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody. Therefore, effective today, I am permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain.

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convexhulled 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, now that SDF font rendering is the industry's preference, he drops the software patent. That is, he is dropping the patent because it isn't a commercially viable piece of software, not because he is ethically opposed to it. Great virtue signaling though.

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dwroberts 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seems more like he had the patent long enough to build a sustainable business from his own work, and now he’s been able to earn enough from it that others’ implementations aren’t a risk to him.

Which is kind of the entire point of patents, just that they last way too long relative to the speed of technological progress

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flohofwoe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SDF font rendering was common long before Slug, and Slug is supposed to be the better solution (I haven't used it though, so cannot comment on its pros and cons vs SDF, but one obvious disadvantage of SDF is that you still need a font atlas texture, and that can get very big if you need to render some East Asian character sets).

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skullt 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SDF font rendering has been around 20+ years though? Valve really popularized in their 2007 SIGGRAPH paper and Chlumský developed MSDF font rendering in a 2015 thesis.

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flipgimble 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SDF font rendering was an industry standard maybe from 2007-2010. and you probably won’t believe what happened to OpenGL since then. Don’t even look into at what people are doing with GPUs these days, you won’t like it one bit!

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ZeWaka 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You do realize he could've just kept it until 2038, right? This was completely unforced.

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LoganDark 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

SDF rendering is just a fuzzy blobby approximation.

	▲	flohofwoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For that it works surprisingly well though, unless you need tiny text.

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actionfromafar 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Software patents valid for 8 years is actually something I could get behind.

	▲	teaearlgraycold 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Copyrights universally dropped to ~20 years as well while we're at it.
	▲	13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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