9 ms·

Oculus accused of destroying evidence, Zuckerberg to testify in VR theft trial

84 points by type0 10y ago

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Oculus has had an ironically Gibsonian beginning for a VR company. Covert funding of politically-motivated cyber gangs, tech leads caught up in undercover sex crime stings, possible theft of cutting edge tech. I guess fiction is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- josh2600 10y ago
  "Beginning" is a weird choice of words. I'm pretty sure palmer funding /thedonald is last year, and Katz's sting was in like December. Anything post-acquisition is not really the beginning anymore methinks. I don't disagree with your assertion that it is a ridiculous series of unfortunate events.
  - alphonsegaston 10y ago
    I was speaking more in terms of its commercial introduction/becoming mainstream, but point taken.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  So has Facebook though, right.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
This is a bit too much gossip and not enough anything substantial.
bkraz 10y ago
It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.
- blazespin 10y ago
  You left because Valve made a good faith gamble in hopes of accelerating the development of VR with no guarantee of return? Was Valve not growing fast enough for you? That being said, yes, I agree that FB has been a tad arrogant with oculus. And, if you look at sales, karma is catching up to them.
  - funkyy 10y ago
    Sounds like he left because of flat management and lack of oversight.
    - blazespin 10y ago
      Valve has always had flat management. Why'd he join in the first place? Valve is a great game company. They've done great, hugely important things. Their work on Vive has been extremely innovative and it seems to be paying off in terms of sales versus Oculus.
      - funkyy 10y ago
        You need to ask him for that. But about flat management - I heard many people saying flat management system have turned Valve to the highschool-style community with "Cool Kids" running things and some people being pushed into the "corner". I have read stories where people comment on how a lot of things are immature in the company. Sorry, I am busy coding now so cannot send citations your way, but they are not hard to find with Google.
      - bkraz 10y ago
        I joined Valve because "flat management" sounds a lot better than it actually is. I don't think Valve's implementation is especially bad -- I would never join another company that has "flat management".
        jayjay71 10y ago
        Is there a reason you didn't want to join Oculus and continue working on the same (or similar) technology with your colleagues?
russtrotter 10y ago
I've always held Carmack in very high regard. He's one of the few folks in our field where if he says he didn't my gut tells me to believe him. Here's to justice being served, one way or another. There's a great comment from a user "Netherhigal" on the comments for the article that says: "If it were anyone else saying they rewrote the code from scratch, I'd call bullshit. With Carmack though? I'd believe he sneezed onto the keyboard and functioning code happened." Pretty much sums up my opinion as well :)
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Carmack is a great person, one of my coding idols. An interesting piece of history is that it was confirmed in the biography Masters of Doom that he started iD software with Romero using company hardware while he was employed by Softdisk, and they had to come to an agreement to continue developing software for them (including Keen games) for a bit after they left in order to appease Softdisk into not suing them into oblivion. Apparently, old habits die hard.
  - sgdread 10y ago
    You must count the fact that computers these days were luxury and one simply cannot afford one like we do nowadays.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      If anything, it makes the case that much more egregious -- there's a difference between borrowing your employer's pen and borrowing expensive high-end lab equipment to start your own competitive enterprise.
      - Zaonce 10y ago
        And yet Ken Levine had no issues doing that with Looking Glass offices and equipment.
        10y ago
hartator 10y ago
Lost a lot of respect for them when they received so much funding and support to end up kick out by the HTC vive with a better headset, controls and no DRM bs.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
As they say, any time there's money on the table, people suddenly come back out of the woodwork and start knocking...
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Given that people are downvoting this, it's interesting that an article just got released confirming that Zuckerberg more or less said the exact same thing I did, from NYT today: "It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something that all kinds of people just kind of come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal," Zuckerberg said.
dleslie 10y ago
> While Carmack admitted to copying thousands of e-mails to a personal hard drive on his last day working for ZeniMax, he testified that he didn't use this code while at Oculus. Instead, Carmack says he rewrote the technology used in the Rift and Gear VR headsets from scratch and that the code he had written at ZeniMax wouldn't even work in the current Oculus headsets. ... I don't think that excuse holds much water; leaving your employer with their code is often theft on its own right, but to then implement it again while plausibly using the stolen code as a reference? Oof.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  I don't think you understand intellectual property law. > "leaving your employer with their code" From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the code to his personal hard drive, only the emails. > "he rewrote the technology ... from scratch" It's a lot tougher to argue that there is a misappropriation of IP if it's a clean room implementation. Code IS the intellectual property here (often, this is even explicitly stated in the standard PIIA agreement). Now, Zenimax's only recourse is possible trade secret misappropriation, which is much harder to establish in court, given the lack of tangible evidence in the form of copied code. That said, the State of California is particularly protective of workers' rights in this latter scenario, non-compete agreements are actually banned here.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    No clean room implementation includes the person who wrote (or saw or used) the original code at another company. Also, email is company IP, or at least confidential info and/or trade secrets.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      No. (To both.) See my cousin post.
      - nihonde 10y ago
        I'm a lawyer, and I continue to disagree.
joeevans1000 10y ago
VR by Facebook is like adventure travel trips organized by WalMart.

84 points by type0 10y ago

Oculus has had an ironically Gibsonian beginning for a VR company. Covert funding of politically-motivated cyber gangs, tech leads caught up in undercover sex crime stings, possible theft of cutting edge tech. I guess fiction is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

josh2600 10y ago
"Beginning" is a weird choice of words. I'm pretty sure palmer funding /thedonald is last year, and Katz's sting was in like December. Anything post-acquisition is not really the beginning anymore methinks. I don't disagree with your assertion that it is a ridiculous series of unfortunate events.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  I was speaking more in terms of its commercial introduction/becoming mainstream, but point taken.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
So has Facebook though, right.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

This is a bit too much gossip and not enough anything substantial.

bkraz 10y ago

It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

blazespin 10y ago
You left because Valve made a good faith gamble in hopes of accelerating the development of VR with no guarantee of return? Was Valve not growing fast enough for you? That being said, yes, I agree that FB has been a tad arrogant with oculus. And, if you look at sales, karma is catching up to them.
- funkyy 10y ago
  Sounds like he left because of flat management and lack of oversight.
  - blazespin 10y ago
    Valve has always had flat management. Why'd he join in the first place? Valve is a great game company. They've done great, hugely important things. Their work on Vive has been extremely innovative and it seems to be paying off in terms of sales versus Oculus.
    - funkyy 10y ago
      You need to ask him for that. But about flat management - I heard many people saying flat management system have turned Valve to the highschool-style community with "Cool Kids" running things and some people being pushed into the "corner". I have read stories where people comment on how a lot of things are immature in the company. Sorry, I am busy coding now so cannot send citations your way, but they are not hard to find with Google.
    - bkraz 10y ago
      I joined Valve because "flat management" sounds a lot better than it actually is. I don't think Valve's implementation is especially bad -- I would never join another company that has "flat management".
      - jayjay71 10y ago
        Is there a reason you didn't want to join Oculus and continue working on the same (or similar) technology with your colleagues?

russtrotter 10y ago

I've always held Carmack in very high regard. He's one of the few folks in our field where if he says he didn't my gut tells me to believe him. Here's to justice being served, one way or another. There's a great comment from a user "Netherhigal" on the comments for the article that says: "If it were anyone else saying they rewrote the code from scratch, I'd call bullshit. With Carmack though? I'd believe he sneezed onto the keyboard and functioning code happened." Pretty much sums up my opinion as well :)

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Carmack is a great person, one of my coding idols. An interesting piece of history is that it was confirmed in the biography Masters of Doom that he started iD software with Romero using company hardware while he was employed by Softdisk, and they had to come to an agreement to continue developing software for them (including Keen games) for a bit after they left in order to appease Softdisk into not suing them into oblivion. Apparently, old habits die hard.
- sgdread 10y ago
  You must count the fact that computers these days were luxury and one simply cannot afford one like we do nowadays.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    If anything, it makes the case that much more egregious -- there's a difference between borrowing your employer's pen and borrowing expensive high-end lab equipment to start your own competitive enterprise.
    - Zaonce 10y ago
      And yet Ken Levine had no issues doing that with Looking Glass offices and equipment.
      - 10y ago

hartator 10y ago

Lost a lot of respect for them when they received so much funding and support to end up kick out by the HTC vive with a better headset, controls and no DRM bs.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

As they say, any time there's money on the table, people suddenly come back out of the woodwork and start knocking...

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Given that people are downvoting this, it's interesting that an article just got released confirming that Zuckerberg more or less said the exact same thing I did, from NYT today: "It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something that all kinds of people just kind of come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal," Zuckerberg said.

dleslie 10y ago

> While Carmack admitted to copying thousands of e-mails to a personal hard drive on his last day working for ZeniMax, he testified that he didn't use this code while at Oculus. Instead, Carmack says he rewrote the technology used in the Rift and Gear VR headsets from scratch and that the code he had written at ZeniMax wouldn't even work in the current Oculus headsets. ... I don't think that excuse holds much water; leaving your employer with their code is often theft on its own right, but to then implement it again while plausibly using the stolen code as a reference? Oof.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
I don't think you understand intellectual property law. > "leaving your employer with their code" From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the code to his personal hard drive, only the emails. > "he rewrote the technology ... from scratch" It's a lot tougher to argue that there is a misappropriation of IP if it's a clean room implementation. Code IS the intellectual property here (often, this is even explicitly stated in the standard PIIA agreement). Now, Zenimax's only recourse is possible trade secret misappropriation, which is much harder to establish in court, given the lack of tangible evidence in the form of copied code. That said, the State of California is particularly protective of workers' rights in this latter scenario, non-compete agreements are actually banned here.
- nihonde 10y ago
  No clean room implementation includes the person who wrote (or saw or used) the original code at another company. Also, email is company IP, or at least confidential info and/or trade secrets.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    No. (To both.) See my cousin post.
    - nihonde 10y ago
      I'm a lawyer, and I continue to disagree.

joeevans1000 10y ago

VR by Facebook is like adventure travel trips organized by WalMart.