I've always hated the notion of "We pay you some small amount to own you 24/7."
In my opinion, what I do outside of work hours is mine and mine alone. I always make sure I state that explicitly and modify any contract that tries to do otherwise.
In my opinion, what I do outside of work hours is mine and mine alone. I always make sure I state that explicitly and modify any contract that tries to do otherwise.
Armadillo was started way before ZeniMax acquired id (thus easy to foresee needing a documented exclusion), whereas Oculus VR wasn't even a thing until a few years after that was a done deal.
This is a common mistake programmers make when dealing with lawyers and other corporate types who stand to gain money from being huge unreasonable assholes.
Obviously, without seeing Carmack's contract, it's impossible to ascertain if he did agree that all work, in our out of the office, including ideas, belonged to ZeniMax.
And even then, the definition of work product could be argued in all kinds of ways. Is it only committed code, does it also include research and sketches. How does it extend to what is shared with others, etc.
Carmack has a good lawyer, I'm sure. Hopefully that lawyer also looked over his ZeniMax contract.
I ended up spending about an hour with their lawyer reviewing and amending the contract until those kinds of clauses were completely taken out. Lucky the lawyer was very amenable to the changes.
Always read the fine print, and don't sign anything if you're at all uncomfortable with it.
I don't think "work hours" is really an applicable concept for someone in Carmack's position - he's not a 9-to-5 worker, his life and work are surely much more entangled.
It's hard to deny that Carmack's involvement in VR was linked to his position at id (Zenimax by extension) in a way that Armadillo for example was not; if nothing else, he did talk (show?) Rift versions of id properties. However, his image, popularity, visibility and even open promotion of Oculus are not really at issue here, at most they would have been grounds for disciplinary action from Zenimax at the time.
It's up to Zenimax to prove exactly what sort of tangible, protected IP and 'know-how' was transferred to Oculus. During 2012 he tweeted often about his research on lag, and I imagine his work was more extensive than what he publicly disclosed. If there's any link between that work and any properties of Zenimax, say a computer, email address, code or assets owned by Zenimax and used in any way to do VR-related work that Oculus took advantage of (even if it's not in use today), then there will be blood, pain and tears.
Basically Zenimax didnt want to do anything with VR while he was there, but now those slimy lawyer cockroaches want piece of the action.