> There has long been a curious lacking of Japanese contributions in software technology. Japan has a highly educated population a good fraction of the US population (127m vs 300m), considerable indigenous R&D capability, long involvement in computing hardware, etc. Hence, if all were equal, one would expect something like a third of all major software packages written by Japanese or Internet services developed by Japanese, and so on. Instead, one notices almost a complete absence of such Japanese contributions. In software, the only major contribution I know of is the Ruby programming language; I am continually struck by the almost complete absence of FLOSS in doujinshi media & the survival and massive popularity of closed-source software. (Touhou Project games remain always closed-source; Westerners would never tolerate a powerful animation tool like MikuMikuDance being only freeware, and would insist on it being opened if only to make bug-fixing and extensions easier. It’s interesting to note that the only visual novel I have ever heard of being under a CC license (albeit a highly restricted CC-BY-NC-ND one) is the Western Katawa Shoujo. Of the 5 major visual novel engines - infrastructure that cries out for open source licensing - only 2 are so licensed.)
