Stallman, Torvalds, Sakamura win Takeda Prize

hal_mit writes: "Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Ken Sakamura have been jointly awarded the first annual Takeda Foundation Prize, for "The origination and the advancement of open development models for system software - open architecture, free software and open source software". This is a major new recognition of the social value of free software and open source."

Comments

What the quick blurb above doesn't say

[Fun In The Sun]

Is that the Takeda award is granted in 3 different areas.

Sakamura, Stallma, and Torvalds were granted the award in the "Social/Economic Well-Being" category. This means that an international group has recognized that Linux and GNU pose great advantages over the current system of closed/secret source.

Hopefully this recognition, and the 100 million yen prize will encourage further efforts to educate the masses.

Anyone know how much 100 million yen is in american dollars?

Re:What the quick blurb above doesn't say

[ajuda]

According to the universal currency converter (xe.com/ucc), 100 million yen is $824,744.81 US. Not bad at all.

Re:Ken who?

[hoggoth]

From the first page on the article linked above:

Ken Sakamura is honored for developing and promoting the TRON open architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems.

Now aren't you embarrassed?

Re:Seriously.

[JabberWokky]

MS is shady at best. However, most people on this board probably would be without jobs had it not been for W95.

Speak for yourself. I was happily doing consulting working in 1992, and since then I have been doing nothing but computer jobs. Previous to that, however, I sold applications for the Apple ][ (an image editor named Digital Palette and a text editor named Ion (which had support for Epson print codes!)). That was well before Windows 95.

There was enough good stuff coming out so that, had Microsoft been absent, we would still be more or less in the same place we are now.

That really brought the PC to the home consumer, and the Internet to the masses.

Wow. You have no historical perspective (or you've been smoking MS Press Releases). Was Win95 your first OS? Did you miss the fact that the WinSock and Netscape programs that brought the Internet to that era's users was not part of Win95 (Know what Tucows stands for)? Hell, I was working in an ISP in 1995, and we put out tons of install disks loaded with 16 bit software.

it's my opinion.

It really sounds like the opinion of someone whose computer experience began fairly recently. That's no *bad*, just keep in mind that perspective on many of these "absolutes" and "beginnings" is important. I almost choked on coffee when someone first said in a meeting, "Well, as the old saying goes, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". That dosen't mean it wasn't true - at the time. And the fact that it's been through iterations just indicates that there are iterations yet to come.

--
Evan

who is Sakamura

[L-Train8]

University of Tokyo professor, who developed the TRON open architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems. TRON stands for The Real-time Operating system Nucleus. You may have know another version, ITRON, or Industrial TRON. Do a search on TRON and Sakamura and you'll find more info than you need.

Takeda prize = $825,900 USD

[Mike_L]

From The Takeda Foundation: "Each award will be accompanied by a monetary prize of 100 million yen."
The XE.com Universal Currency Converter yields these figures:

100,000,000.00 Japan Yen = $825,900.067 United States Dollars

This is $275,300 USD for each of the awardees.