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> Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises.

Well, they don't have to. He could have insisted on writing this condition into the acquisition contract. But he obviously didn't. The most charitable reading of this is that he was just naive and didn't know that this was an option or that it would be necessary in order to enforce such a promise, but that seems unlikely. Acquiring this knowledge is no harder than posing the question to his M&A attorney. Hence...

> I absolutely do not t respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one?

I think you made the right call here.

I wonder if it's possible to make such a contract that works? If it curtails Facebook, and they breach the contract, then what? They pay the seller some more money?

If you reverted ownership there's no way that FB are going to sign that contract (a small risk you could inadvertently lose the asset and the cost price, eg through an unforeseen loophole that favours the seller - lawyers should veto such things, surely).

Also, are you going to make it a perpetual term applied to all future owners? If not then FB can probably make an entity to sell it to. Or use a third-party login that itself requires Facebook login and workaround your selling constraints.

I like the idea of it: just practically I can't see how it would be workable to technically constrain a company in a contract of sale of that company.

Are there examples of where this has been done successfully?

> I wonder if it's possible to make such a contract that works?

Yes. In short, you expressly identify in the contract that the provision is for the benefit of Oculus Rift users, and then they gain the power to enforce it as “intended third-party beneficiaries”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_beneficiary

Thank you. Any examples of this in the field of computing, where users were made party to the contract of sale of a company in order to protect some aspect of their usage?

The examples I can find [there] don't seem to bear much similarity to this situation at all.

IANAL but my guess is that you could structure it in such a way that every user affected by the breach had standing to sue for some specified amount of damages so that collectively it would have been worth some lawyer's time to take the case on contingency.

It's entirely possible that FB would have balked, but that in itself would have been a useful data point that indicated that they had every intention of bundling the two products together.

In any case, the topic at hand is not so much whether such a deal could have been structured to work, but whether there are any circumstances short of willful ignorance where the founder could have made the promise he did in good faith. I don't see any.

Naivety seems to account for making such a promise, the idea that others have similarly honourable intentions to oneself can persist and cause such errors of judgement.

Harshing on Palmer might feel like the right thing for folks, but they should be harshing on Facebook right now. Palmer has little to no agency and by focusing on the scapegoat, we ignore the avenues for change that are available right now.

Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.

I agree. Ultimately it was Facebooks decision to enact this policy. Why do people gravitate towards blaming him ? Is it just because they feel he’s lied to them and should be held accountable even though he may have only been naive ?

Its funny how in situations like this one, where one person facilitates another’s wrongdoing, they (Palmer) are put under the spotlight more so than the bad actor (Facebook)

They got him to admit he was wrong. That's more satisfaction than they'll get from Facebook.

Well, to a cynical person facebook is a user privacy wood chipper.

You don't throw something into a wood chipper then get mad at the wood chipper for chopping it up - that's just what it does.

(Of course it's easy for me to say, I haven't spent $$$ on Oculus products)

>> Why do people gravitate towards blaming him ?

It is entirely possible that some consumers, if not some developers / investors / etc, made choices and decisions based on those unequivocal claims.

> Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.

This a thousand times. I wonder however what people like me can do from the outside, save for keep refusing to open a Facebook account.

> they should be harshing on Facebook right now.

“Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m34s

That's to a certain degree fair; to a certain degree missing the point:

1. It's NOT binary; I generally try not to partake of "You're either with us or against us". We can hold multiple parties accountable, we can be objective about facts, and we can learn multiple lessons.

2. I'm not actually certain there's behaviour for Facebook to modify. They're a corporation with a wildly successful massive SSO program. They've acquired another smaller corporation. Integrating into the mothership SSO feels the right sensible choice from many perspectives. As an annoying privacy conscious geek, sure, I don't love Facebook integration. But this is a reasonable perspective from point of the corporation.

3. Which brings me back to - I still think the truest lesson learned is for all of us naive enough that for whatever unicorn reason, this wouldn't happen. At that includes shareholders, consumers, and the wild-eyed founders making promises :)

As I said, I don't know him, don't intend to bug him, doesn't bother me much, don't intend to "Harsh" on him. But he did have agency, and he did make some claims, and we should all learn some lessons on how to exercise agency and how to make/believe promises.

You are missing an important they in the list of why these empty promises are made: keeping up the value of the property. There's an implicit, and often also an explicit (e.g. in the form of the founder becoming an employee) agreement that the seller won't talk down the value of what they just sold. Claiming that all will be well, despite Facebook, was very much in the interest of Facebook. Including the fact that the promise was made by someone who'd most likely be gone before the promise stopped being true.

> I'm sure he's a nice guy and great person

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/19/15366500/palmer-luckey-tr...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/how-your-oculus-...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/palmer-luckey-aundur...

Does that change your opinion?

> acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them

Not just acquired founders. In my opinion we should stop so readily believing in promises by founders, start ups, corporations, celebrities, politicians, etc. unless there is a strong track record keeping them and/or other reasons to believe the promise can and will be kept.

Getting people to (pre-/re-)purchase something should require to build up trust, not just grand visions and good marketing.

What are some examples of evil people that

> need to be doxxed or torched...

?

I completely agree with your assessment, except... Palmer was a kid and they just made him a multimillionaire. There’s no way he was in a headspace to rationally evaluate anything, let alone evaluate the long term weaseliness of a large corporation.

Zuck is still a kid. The corporate weaseliness starts at the top.

Yeah but he has entire teams of full-grown weasels with decades of weaselly experience each.

1. I feel that was addressed in my post as one of the potential reasons he made the claims

2. Read Ender's game or Dune or live through a civil war as a child or... whatever it takes to agree that a 22 year old can and should be regarded as a responsible, accountable human being. Otherwise really who can?

Multimillionaires don't deserve our pity for their lies. They can comfort themselves on their piles of money (whatever is remaining after the amount spent promoting the corruption of the USA government as Mr Luckey did).