Remind me not to sign any contracts with you, because you're just too cool for that sort of thing.
If Carmack felt like developing VR outside of Zenimax offices, he obviously could have. So it must be true that Zenimax didn't actually help VR in any substantial way. Carmack's VR development just happened to take place within a Zenimax building.
He had a contractual exemption for Armadillo. His development 'just happened' to take place inside a Zenimax building, ie the workplace where he was employed. If you're on someone's payroll and working in their building, I think it's sort of reasonable for them to expect that you're working to advance their interests rather than your own.
Your new top talent goes on to create many millions of dollars of value for your company.
Or so you think, until you wake up one morning and discover that he's left for Facebook along with the high-profile new technology you thought you was going to bring you many millions of dollars in game revenue.
Sorry, but it sounds like since you hero-worship John Carmack he shouldn't be required to abide by any sort of contractual agreements he signs up to, which strikes me as a bit immature.
While I haven't read the complaint and am not informed on the specifics of this case, I agree that under the parent commenter's logic, there'd be no commercial benefit to paying for R&D. If you're going to pump the cash into R&D, you have to be able to net something from it. R&D-type guys are going to have many varied interests, and it's certainly advisable that they create a hard, impermeable separation between things that they want their employer to be able to claim, and things they don't (i.e., don't even think about projects that you don't want your employer to claim while you're on their clock, in their building, or using their mail servers).
It may be that Carmack was used to there not really being a major distinction between what he owned and what id owned, and got caught off-guard by ZeniMax's insistence that this was a ZeniMax-only kind of thing now.
If Carmack felt like developing VR outside of Zenimax offices, he obviously could have. So it must be true that Zenimax didn't actually help VR in any substantial way. Carmack's VR development just happened to take place within a Zenimax building.
He had a contractual exemption for Armadillo. His development 'just happened' to take place inside a Zenimax building, ie the workplace where he was employed. If you're on someone's payroll and working in their building, I think it's sort of reasonable for them to expect that you're working to advance their interests rather than your own.
Your new top talent goes on to create many millions of dollars of value for your company.
Or so you think, until you wake up one morning and discover that he's left for Facebook along with the high-profile new technology you thought you was going to bring you many millions of dollars in game revenue.
Sorry, but it sounds like since you hero-worship John Carmack he shouldn't be required to abide by any sort of contractual agreements he signs up to, which strikes me as a bit immature.