Well, this was bound to happen. It seems that Zenimax wants to put some pressure on Facebook and gain something from the recent acquisition of Oculus Rift. After all, the timing is fishy. But let’s take things from the beginning.
Earlier yesterday, Zenimax confirmed that it recently sent formal notice of its legal rights to Oculus concerning its ownership of key technology used by Oculus to develop and market the Oculus Rift. As the company claimed, the ‘proprietary technology and know-how Mr. Carmack developed when he was a ZeniMax employee, and used by Oculus, are owned by ZeniMax.’
Zenimax bases those claims on this non-disclosure agreement that – according to Zenimax – was signed by Oculus’ Palmer Luckey.
John Carmack reacted to the accusations of ‘stealing’ the code he wrote in the first place. As Carmack claimed, ‘no work that he has ever done has been patented.’ While he acknoledged that Zenimax owns the code that he wrote, the programming guru said that Zenimax does not own VR.
This obviously confused a number of Carmack’s followers, thus Carmack clarified things in a following tweet:
Naturally, the timing of this whole thing feels suspicious. Carmack left id Software back in August, almost 9 months ago. And we are pretty sure that Zenimax would have not sent a formal notice if Facebook has not purchased Oculus Rift.
It will be interesting to see what will happen, and whether this will affect the development of the Oculus Rift!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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