I respect him for eating humble pie now.
I absolutely do not respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one? There's nothing NEW that came to the table: Facebook can do what they want now, and crucially that was the case at the time of those promises.
Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises. Whether they're made out of ego, faith, hope, naivette, inocence, or just riding that payday high and feeling king of the world - acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them; and holding accountable / not absolving is a step in that direction. They're not evil people, they don't need to be doxxed or torched... but it's a certain level of wrong to make promises you absolutely positively cannot deliver upon, and good will does not make such ignorance OK :-/
Sorry if that came harsh; I feel bad for Palmer... but hey, should we not feel worse for those who believed him and acted upon that belief??
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.
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?
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”.
The examples I can find [there] don't seem to bear much similarity to this situation at all.
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.
Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.
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)
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)
It is entirely possible that some consumers, if not some developers / investors / etc, made choices and decisions based on those unequivocal claims.
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.
“Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower”.
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.
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?
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.
> need to be doxxed or torched...
?
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?
He should have known he couldn't promise that. He could not have known Facebook would do what they did but he should have been at least smart enough to know the limits of his own influence.
You can be naive, but naive doesn't mean you go online and argue that people who know better are wrong, which is what he did.
Now he knows better. He has changed his mind. Which is what any rational person should do when presented with new information.
On the one hand I won't vilify him.
On the other hand he merely met the base requirements for "rational thinking" - so I am not about to give him any accolades.
Isn't this exactly what being naive means?
Palmer was suffering from confident ignorance.
This sentence seems self-contradictory. Once again, here's what Palmer said:
> I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
It sounds like he's agreeing that he should be getting the blowback, right? He made a promise he couldn't keep, people told him he wouldn't be able to keep it, he ignored them. He should have known better.
Does he deserve the blowback? Probably not.
Was it an extremely naive promise to make given historical experience and the company that acquired you? Absolutely.
The point you make may be relevant for deciding damages, but even here there is a concept of Liquidated Damages [0] which is essentially the damages amount set at day 1 so the question of ascertaining the extent of wrong does not arise.
A contract is a matter for civil law. Breaking a term of a contract doesn't automatically mean that a court will consider a remedy.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)#Standing_requir...: in the US, "the plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury".
I'm just saying that an injury is required in principle (with an appropriate citation), because the great-grandparent (by vijayr02) didn't think that was the case.
If he got it written into the contract then it is clear that he does not intend to pursue it.
If it was written into the contract and he pursues it then he will need to show that he has suffered because the contract was not executed and I fail to see how he could make that case and do so with enough teeth that it would matter to FB enough to reverse course.
The example of UK bank overdraft charges in the Wikipedia article for instance can be seen as small powerless individuals vs large corporate.
In the Oculus case, a good lawyer should have been able to set out in the contract why this specific point is important to the seller (Palmer) and why significant damages are in order (damages credibility on future projects, which clearly could be multi-billion in scope).
Obviously Facebook can do what they want within the terms.