Absolutely true.
> Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.
I don't think that is the case. "Unhappy with what he saw as Toshiba's failure to reward his work, Masuoka quit to become a professor at Tohoku University." He was very well compensated AND given full credit and even allowed to publish his work.
It was ABSOLUTELY about the money! As the article mentions: "He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."
From a different article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31/toshiba_settles_wit...
"Masuoka had told the court in 2004 that he believed ¥1bn ($9.1m) was appropriate compensation for the contribution his inventions had made to Toshiba's profits"
> I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name ...
Again, absolutely true. But that was not the case here at all. If anything we should recognize that Masuoka was the lead scientist for a team of engineers, that means he had a more managerial role and other junior engineers actually did the work.
I don't think we really disagree on anything. I just hate it when people take out their pitchforks and go after the "big, bad corporations" every time one of these articles hits HN :/. Japanese culture is very different than what we in the west are accustomed to and the situation is a lot more complicated than just blaming all on the evil CEOs.