Just got a half billion dollar court settlement rammed up its asshole.
Oculus was deemed by a Dallas jury as having illegally obtained VR trade secrets from Zenimax subsidiary id Software. At the heart of the trial was John Carmack - a former programmer for id who is now the Chief Technical Officer at Occulus...
Carmack's the graphical code wizard that worked on DOOM back in the day. He goes on to call bullshit.
Essentially, an expert witness testified that he was "absolutely certain" the finalized Oculus Rift source code closely resembled code Carmack had previously developed while at Zenimax.
"This is just not true," said Carmack. "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."
That should be a fucking open and shut case for any first semester programming student, except you'll never see the code comparison.
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. If the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis.
Damn shame, because I'd really like to.
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.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."