John Carmack Uses Mac Only Under Duress

gxp500 said:
He must of skimmed through that part of the contract and blindly signed it... it happens to rookies, this is like the second company he worked for.
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I don't think you can easily say he did not know. This person ran a company which specialized in developing cutting edge game engines and games. id software was a major game engine licensing powerhouse in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Doom, Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 engines were widely used by other game developers. I doubt Carmack might have been stupid to assume what he developed is his when working at Zenimax. There is no way you can copy source code you developed at your work place on your work PC and walk away from the employer and go ahead and use the same at your new employer and expect not to be found guilty in court of IP theft.
 
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Hypergreatthing said:
Has anyone noticed that the occulus logo looks like some abstract version of goatsxe?
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At first I thought you misspelled goat sex, and I was going to make some joke about Oculus taking Goat Simulator to the next level. But I had to check first and I hate you.
 
bigdogchris said:
At first I thought you misspelled goat sex, and I was going to make some joke about Oculus taking Goat Simulator to the next level. But I had to check first and I hate you.
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You must be new to the Internet. Welcome. Goatse is one of the images the Internet we know today was built upon. The Goatse man is a great inspiration to us all and has affected many lives throughout the years. A great amount of older memes and images will also now make sense.
 
Kalabalana said:
So have they proven anything used by Oculus was developed/stolen by Carmack (developed when he was at Zenimax)?
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The jury sided with Oculus on that one, so there must not be enough evidence to prove it.
 
Johnx64 said:
You must be new to the Internet. Welcome. Goatse is one of the images the Internet we know today was built upon. The Goatse man is a great inspiration to us all and has affected many lives throughout the years. A great amount of older memes and images will also now make sense.
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Aw FaK! I had to go and Google that, didn't I...

Yes, why yes those memes do make more sense.. I feel enlightened now.. albeit also slightly disturbed.

Anyways, back on topic...

Carmack posted this on FB:

 
sboucher said:
Carmack posted this on FB:

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If you have two companies building something, say a game engine, they are both going to have the same end result (a functional engine) with similarities (network code, ai code, physics code, etc) but that doesn't mean they "non-literally copied" each other.

I don't know about the other parts of the case, but at least some of this penalty should be reduced in appeals, at least surrounding the code part. That's just ridiculous.
 
zkostik said:
I actually rather enjoyed that game, not at full price of course but it was a fun game and atmosphere was great. I hope it's just a typical let's hate Rage comment.
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Just went back and played through that a few months ago. I like it too.
 


"The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread.

Being sued sucks. For the most part, the process went as I expected.

The exception was the plaintiff’s expert that said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software.

This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases.

Early on in his testimony, I wanted to stand up say “Sir! As a man of (computer) science, I challenge you to defend the efficacy of your methodology with data, including false positive and negative rates.” After he had said he was “Absolutely certain there was non-literal copying” in several cases, I just wanted to shout “You lie!”. By the end, after seven cases of “absolutely certain”, I was wondering if gangsters had kidnapped his grandchildren and were holding them for ransom.

If he had said “this supports a determination of”, or dozens of other possible phrases, then it would have fit in with everything else, but I am offended that a distinguished academic would say that his ad-hoc textual analysis makes him “absolutely certain” of anything. That isn’t the language of scientific inquiry.

The notion of non-literal copying is probably delicious to many lawyers, since a sufficient application of abstraction and filtering can show that just about everything is related. There are certainly some cases where it is true, such as when you translate a book into another language, but copyright explicitly does not apply to concepts or algorithms, so you can’t abstract very far from literal copying before comparing. As with many legal questions, there isn’t a bright clear line where you need to stop.

The analogy that the expert gave to the jury was that if someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed, it would still be copyright infringement. I agree; that is the literary equivalent of changing the variable names when you copy source code. However, if you abstract Harry Potter up a notch or two, you get Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which also maps well onto Star Wars and hundreds of other stories. These are not copyright infringement.

There are objective measures of code similarity that can be quoted, like the edit distance between abstract syntax trees, but here the expert hand identified the abstract steps that the code fragments were performing, made slides that nobody in the courtroom could actually read, filled with colored boxes outlining the purportedly analogous code in each case. In some cases, the abstractions he came up with were longer than the actual code they were supposed to be abstracting.

It was ridiculous. Even without being able to read the code on the slides, you could tell the steps varied widely in operation count, were often split up and in different order, and just looked different.

The following week, our side’s code expert basically just took the same slides their expert produced (the judge had to order them to be turned over) and blew each of them up across several slides so you could actually read them. I had hoped that would have demolished the credibility of the testimony, but I guess I overestimated the impact.

Notably, I wasn’t allowed to read the full expert report, only listen to him in trial, and even his expert testimony in trial is under seal, rather than in the public record. This is surely intentional -- if the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis. I still have a level of morbid curiosity about the several hundred-page report.

The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger to your reputation if you are imprudent."
 
bigdogchris said:
If you have two companies building something, say a game engine, they are both going to have the same end result (a functional engine) with similarities (network code, ai code, physics code, etc) but that doesn't mean they "non-literally copied" each other.

I don't know about the other parts of the case, but at least some of this penalty should be reduced in appeals, at least surrounding the code part. That's just ridiculous.
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That is fine when it is two different companies with no connections. The problem is that when company A is building something and then one of the employees goes and helps company B build something how can that person not use their knowledge from A in helping B?

Let's look at something a little different. Space travel. Let's say that Space X gets their falcon 9 rockets to land every time perfectly. Then one of the main engineers starts doing some work on the side with another company looking at their rocket designs of a similar style rocket before finally leaving Space X and going to the other company where they create their own version of the Falcon 9. Sure you can both create similar rockets without any copying, but in the case of my example can you say 100% that the engineer would not use a single concept or design from Space X at the new company building the new rocket?
 
Exavior said:
That is fine when it is two different companies with no connections. The problem is that when company A is building something and then one of the employees goes and helps company B build something how can that person not use their knowledge from A in helping B?
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You're totally right. That's what no competition clauses are for in contracts. As far as I know, that has never came up so there probably was not one and that is not John's fault.
 
zenimax responded to carmacks claim.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._denies_allegations_slams_expert_analysis.php

"UPDATE: Zenimax has responded to Carmack's criticisms, and has offered the following statement to Gamasutra:

"In addition to expert testimony finding both literal and non-literal copying, Oculus programmers themselves admitted using Zenimax’s copyrighted code (one saying he cut and pasted it into the Oculus SDK), and [Oculus VR co-founder] Brendan Iribe, in writing, requested a license for the 'source code shared by Carmack' they needed for the Oculus Rift. Not surprisingly, the jury found Zenimax code copyrights were infringed. The Oculus Rift was built on a foundation of Zenimax technology."

"As for the denial of wiping, the Court’s independent expert found 92 percent of Carmack’s hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts.""
 
LOL, the ride never ends. I don't know who to believe, but I don't like Oculus so, hey, I'm entertained.
 
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