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.

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.