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Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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I'd encourage everyone to read the article. It paints a far more nuanced picture than the headline suggests.
Nuanced yes, but it largely being driven by a Japanese guy who wanted to sell US software and US companies who didn't want to compete by actually selling compatible hardware is no less damning.
Yeah. That guys "nuance" comment made me read the article, and I'm glad I did, but the end result was my expectation going in; the profit motive of capitalism killed a FOSS OS that could have nullified Americas tech dominance before it even started.
There's no way to know how it would've played out, but I could see Bill Gates' connected family greasing the wheels of geopolitics to scare the Japanese out of implementing it, or being the catalyst promoting exclusive US proprietary tech rights to Japanese capitalists, or the CIA/NSA arguing that a Japanese controlled FOSS OS would make it harder for them to influence tech standards. Basically, like most things I've learned about history, it's likely that morally and ethically bankrupt, sociopathic, criminals had their hands balls deep in the clusterfuck of a horror show, in many more ways than one.
According to the article it was royalty free and published open standards, but they do not make any claim to this being an FOSS system.
Per Wikipedia…
It’s not even a software project as we know it. It’s a specification like POSIX, and presumably, anything implementing the spec can be certified if it passes a test suite, like UNIX.
It would have been a completely rigged game for a US company to try and sell and TRON products in the Japanese market.
This is exactly why it was protectionism and could have caught trade sanctions had it been more widely adopted.
It gives more details, but it doesn't particularly make the US not look like a bunch of dickholes whose definition of "free market" changes to shape whatever suits them from one moment to the next.