Re: [tlug] TRON / Ken Sakamura in 2003.07.17 Japan Times

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Jim BLACKSON wrote:

> On 2003.07.17 acmuller@example.com wrote in "Re: Unicode":
> > Participants in TRON, led by their boss, Ken Sakamura, trash everything
> > that wasn't made by them.
> 
> Speaking of Tron and Ken Sakamura, they are featured in an article in 
> today's 2003.07.17 Technotimes section of the Japan Times.  The 
> article, "Japan's own software guru" by George Nishiyama, suggests
> Sakamura "would easily be a dollar billionaire by now, perhaps even 
> rivaling Gates," if Sakamura had charged one cent to each TRON user.
> 
> The article also mentions that "TRON is distributed free of charge",
> is an "embedded" operating system, used on up to an estimated 
> 4 billion devices world-wide (60% share of microprocessors), compared 
> to Windows' 150 million computers, and was once under consideration 
> as an unfair trade barrier in US-Japan talks.

I saw this as well. Somehow Sakamura gets himself into the Japanese media on
a regular basis. His position as computer science guy at Todai seems to
continue to give him currency. They also recently did a thing on him and
TRON on NHK's XProject. There, Sakamura claimed that if the U.S. had not
changed some trade regulation in the early 90's, Windows today would be
non-existent, and we would all be using TRON instead. I almost fell out of
my chair laughing.

Sakamura is regularly asked by Japanese newspapers to write articles on the
current state of computing, the digital world, and so forth. Does he ever
talk about the WWWEb? No. Does he ever talk about Linux? No. All he ever
talks about is TRON, TRON, TRON, and how everything else is totally
useless. I'm sure he must be frustrated as hell to watch the success of
Linux, which was built by dedicated hackers around the world while he was
spending billions of yen paying his programmers at Todai.

Sakamura is treading in a funny area when he makes the kinds of statements
that he does in that article, especially when he mentions that he could have
been rich. This is related to the point about immense national funding that
I mentioned in my prior post. Whatever we might say about Gates, at least
his initial success was due to his own cleverness and savvy. How can
Sakamura claim that he would have been rich, when he built his entire
project on a series of monstrous government grants, for which, relatively
speaking, little has been produced? If any money is made off of TRON, it
should go back to the Japanese taxpayers who unwittingly funded this whole
affair. For him to claim that he could have gotten rich is sickening.

I know of a few other software projects and digital CJK projects that were
based sounder principles and had better people working for them, who sought
funding at from the Ministry of Education at the same time as TRON, and were
squashed (actually, it sounds a little microsoftish to me). Later on, in the
area of CJK databasing, three guys in a little office came along and made
Mojikyo based on their own resources, and in a few short years produced a
Chinese character database and input system that in terms of usability, far
surpassed the one that TRON had spend twenty years on.

As far as the figure of "%60 share of microprocessors" is concerned: this is
misleading, because it gives people the impression that 60% of actual
computing is done on TRON. The fact that tiny microprocessors in dumb little
devices are using bits of TRON code does not it any way bring it to a level
of comparability to the major operating systems.

I guess that provides a tiny hint as to how I feel about this.

Chuck

---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
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