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Comment by miloignis | Hacker News Reader

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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> 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.

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.

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

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

He said "holding on to it any longer benefits nobody", implicitly including himself. He may believe that it's to his advantage for the patent to be more widely used.

Which makes sense--I don't doubt that he is a subject matter expert where this patent is concerned. If this algorithm continues to be widely used or its use increases, then that would be likely be good for him.

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.

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!

SDF rendering is just a fuzzy blobby approximation.

For that it works surprisingly well though, unless you need tiny text.

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).

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

Copyrights universally dropped to ~20 years as well while we're at it.

My feeling is that copyrights should be infinitely renewable, with say a 20 year term, but the renewal fee should double with each term so that Disney can have their infinite copyright on Snow White but at an ever-increasing cost so that they will need to make a decision about whether it makes sense to keep it.

My utopian vision: First registration is free and automatic. Copyright holders get an automated notification of expiring copyright and renewal is, say $1000 for the first term (adjusting for inflation) and doubling thereafter (also adjusting for inflation, so you don’t get a $2000 renewal but more like $4400 with 4% inflation). For corporate-held and posthumous extensions, the term would be 10 years.

> so that Disney can have their infinite copyright on Snow White

If copyright was inifinite, then Disney would never have been able to make Snow White in the first place. They didn't invent the story!

Even if they did, it seems like a huge negative to society for copywright not to expire.

The thing here is the exponentially increasing cost of renewing the copyright, with the inflation-adjustment I proposed and the 10-year term for a corporate or posthumous copyright, in 90 years, that $1000 renewal fee goes to $256000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. 110 years it’s a million dollars, 210 years it’s a billion dollars. If a work is worth spending that kind of money on renewing the copyright, why not let them keep it?

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