A signed distance field approach can be good depending on what you're after. https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Distance-field-fonts

You can always render the text to a texture offline as a signed distance field and just draw out quads as needed at render time. This will always be faster than drawing from the curves, and rendering from an SDF (especially multi-channel variants) scales surprisingly well if you choose the texture/glyph size well.

A little more info:

https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-text-with-signed-distance-fi...

MIT-licensed open-source multi-channel glyph generation:

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

The only remaining issue would be the kerning/layout, which is admittedly far from simple.

FOSS does not magically circumvent patents.