I expect Carmack got some pretty shiny golden handcuffs in the deal, I wouldn't expect him to jump ship anytime soon.

I expect Carmack is the sort of guy to say "fuck your golden handcuffs, I'd rather work on interesting problems". If it turns bad he'd go.

This is why I'm astonished: it also seemed to me that Carmack is that sort of guy, you know, real programmer. idealistic, stubborn. Maker, not businessman. But whatever be all that "Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we"… blah blah — I cannot really imagine why he would do so if not only for the sake of business. Well, it might be easier to make stuff when company with infinite resources parents you for sure, but still…

No, I definitely have to reconsider if that idealistic picture of Carmack in my brain is correct. Not that I ever knew him, anyway…

I would bet that yes your picture is correct.

He posted on twitter:

"I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length..."

Never signing up for FB account indicates to me that he's got as much disdain for Facebook as many people here.

He also tweeted:

"I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."

Which hints to me that he's at least intrigued by the possibilities that partnering with Facebook will offer, and he sees some potential in this partnership.

Carmack has earned enough of my respect over the last few decades that if it turns out he's ok with the acquisition and stays with the company, then as much as I dislike Facebook, I'm going to trust his judgement and be confident that he's hard at work on something 'game-changing'.

Why is not having a FB account "disdain"? I realize that you have some sort of anti-FB ax to grind and does most of HN. I haven't logged into FB for 6 months, but it is because of apathy, not disdain. Why would John be any different?

What makes a "real programmer" though? Do you think he'd be programming in a hut for no money? He isn't daft.

I'd say there are certain programmers, who after reaching a certain financial security threshold, would do exactly that. Just as there are people who would happily sail a yacht around the world indefinitely, though it would bore me silly. Is Carmack one of those? Who can say. This kind of programmer can be disguised by the fact that code hermits often make money by accident! When you love what you do, what you do tends to be good.

I have met Carmack before at Siggraph many years ago and I can say that he struck me as someone who was a 'Code Troll' because he loved it. That he made money was great, but I think he has such a deep love of the technology for technologies sake.

I expect he will have a similar situation that Ray Kurzweil has at Google.

Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google's current management to work at Google. How is this in any way analogous to Carmack's situation at Oculus, now Facebook?

The similarities are they are legendary & forward thinking technologists given a large amount of capital to pursue their passion and scale their vision.

Corporate title & organizition wise, they are different. Though I doubt Kurzweil worries too much about the current Ads, Search, Email, & Android platform. I would expect his role to be more forward thinking. I get the impression Carmack has a forward thinking role as well.

Carmack is the CTO. He's in charge of the technical direction of the company as a whole. A company whose mission is pretty clearly defined.

This is very, very different from what Kurzweil is doing at Google.

True, Oculus has more focus & a narrower scope.

Though, we will see what a $2B valuation does to a "clearly defined" mission. The VR market has to be grown, after all.

Google is expanding it's efforts in new markets that require substantial technical vision. Same with Oculus.

Kurzweil is the "Director of Engineering" at a company without a CTO. Surely, there's some similarities in their roles.

Not a 100% match, but some interesting similarities.

"Director of Engineering" is a title. Google has literally hundreds of engineering directors. (I work at Google.)

I'm not sure how true this is, but I recently watched an anti-google documentary about their book-scanning business and they said sources familiar with Larry Page claim that he had no interest in Google as a business but rather was attempting to achieve advanced AI through Google.

But where are his keyboards now??????

What does that mean?

Presumably that having the resources (servers and infrastructure, devs, designers, researchers, business connections, data, etc) available at the parent company is a bigger incentive than running things yourself (even if you have the financial means to do so).

He doesn't seem like the type who would be wanting for money.

carmack doesn't need golden handcuffs. he earned fuck you money back then in the '90s.

And you are positive he still has all that money? I wouldn't assume anything these days. There are plenty of people who are worth millions who stick around someplace they don't want to be to be worth tens or hundreds of millions.

Money is a real thing, no matter how awesome Carmack is (he's an idol of mine as well), it certainly can play a role in decisions.

Especially considering how much armadillo must have burnt.

And he subsequently lost a lot of it in passion investments. He has a talk about it somewhere.

Seems like a good opportunity to revive Armadillo, no? I mean … he has not been with Oculus for too long, officially at least, despite giving them the praise that earned them $2bn.

All in all, a fair deal for Oculus, I think. Now the question is, will Facebook be able to get a ROI? To me, this looks like a lucky day for Sony, but maybe that's my geek-glasses fooling me.

I'm very interested to see what Carmack does. I hope the whole team moves to Valve or something, and this doesn't set back VR another 10 years.

Good point on seeing what Carmack will do.

Although they announced Carmack joining Oculus in August last year. Any idea how long the negotiations for this acquisition would likely take?

I too am disappointed the tech has gone into Facebook, I wonder what those game developers that currently support it are thinking, and how much integration there will be with Facebook login etc.

They've said that they formally got the ball rolling on the acquisition less than two weeks ago.