Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

This is really exciting to see for me personally.

I've been pushing over the past six months or so for multiple clients, from healthcare companies with basic mobile apps to deep gaming companies / products, to adopt Rive over Lottie and other past solutions, as I think it's finally hit its stride and is "ready-for-adoption".

This was the last piece that came up in some of those discussions as a potential concern (latest renderer being "closed source" / not quite final).

Really excited to see this problem space continue to improve thanks to this decision and the work the Rive team is doing in general (drop shadows, blur, etc. are all going to be very exciting as they ship)!

> And MIT license.

For me, that’s very much the unimpressive part.

So I love Rive—the product and the company. And I love open source.

But this is an MIT license for Rive's rendering abstraction layer, a subset of the Rive runtime that requires the Rive Editor to build content for.

I'm just curious about the goals for open sourcing this and what your hope and plan is for the larger community you'd like to build around it. Can you think of perhaps another project that would benefit from adopting just the renderer? Thanks!

Fonts begin as vector graphics, but every single character on your screen isn't rendered as a tiny, individual vector graphic. Text rendering libraries use a lot of optimizations to cache rasterized glyphs because they're reused all over your screen.

It also gets extraordinarily complex when you have to handle text layout, kerning, languages that read in different directions, styles, and all of the other complications that come with font rendering.

TrueType fonts even support a small virtual machine to process tiny code programs related to font rendering. It's an incredibly deep topic.

It seems to be just the very basement level of an open source Rive-type project. You would need to build the runtime around this renderer and then of course the authoring app. It would still be quite a lift, but hey, success does start with high-performance vectors.

More likely, I see perhaps other projects with vector-rendering needs (in-game UIs, video creation tools, svg tools, etc) perhaps studying or adopting the render to make their own graphics more performant.

But to answer your question on "who pays for this?" I can raise my hand and say "I do!" and it's a great value. But just like Copilot probably isn't the best monthly investment if you're not doing quite a bit of coding, Rive probably isn't the best investment if you aren't doing quite a bit of animation.