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After getting re-acquainted with each other, Bud explained to David that he wanted to work with David with very guarded legal mind. He wanted David to sign "non-disclosure agreement" with him first before beginning any work. David love to be legal all the time, therefore he was very willing to oblige Bud's requests. In fact, he guessed that he had filled out more legal documents than most people in this world already just by going across the border from countries to countries. He also suspected that if there is a Google search engine for all the legal documents in border crossings of the world , his name would surface up so much that other people would think of him as a dog with above average hyper-active bladder that had forced him to urinate everywhere more than usual. After signing the simple "non-disclosure agreement" faxed from Bud, David learned the creative idea that Mr. Westwood wanted to apply for a patent in the transportation industry. As a franchised restaurant owner of "Burrito House", Bud employed a large number of delivery drivers who are known for driving fast and furious to deliver on time. His new idea is to attach GPS tracking systems to his vehicles driven by his young drivers as a way of best practical driving guide for the city of Houston in hours of traffic jams. He would publish the driving routes of his fleet dynamically on his web sites and make them also available on PDA, cell phones and Blackberries to help people navigate through rush hour traffics. He believed the first step is to apply for a patent for this idea before doing any real research and development work, so anybody else trying to develop similar applications afterwards would be subject to his possible law suites. In the meantime, Bud was also looking for investors who would be interested in writing him a $5 million check to share the risks in the business venture. Without commenting on the quality of the idea, David felt like Y2K all over again, since what Bud described was exactly the kind of approaches he witnessed among technology companies during the .com period. Since David is an avid Open source buff outside of the corporate environment and office hours, he had doubted the practicality of protecting intellectual properties with patent in the Internet prevailing era. Even in the time of Charles Dickens, the famous 19th century author wrote an article mocking the reality that it took too complicated a process and took too long for patents to be approved, much like how David would describe a green card application process for a P. R. China citizen. It was also said by one famous Microsoft official: "if Microsoft had to study thoroughly whether everyone of its technology had been patented, before starting its product developments, then Microsoft would have not produced any product in the last 6 years". With the emergence of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Java, Eclipse, SQL Server 2005 Express, Oracle Express … the list goes endlessly, more and more technology businesses entities were willingly, or forced, to let users use their products for free. It really seemed like the products or companies that weren't the stickler of the "intellectual property" protection processes were the ones winning the heart, support and checkbooks of the new generations in the technology business and the trend would continue, simply because of human nature -- which is everybody likes free lunch, if there is really such a thing. However, David could not convince his old friend and new found employer to drop his traditional "inventor" thinking, and he did not intend to refuse income opportunities because Bud did not want to turn into a computer geek, so he gladly accepted Bud's requests to be an expert witness for his patent application. The duties to be performed for being an expert witness for a patent case was simple. David only needed to fill in his educational qualifications and years of experiences in the transportation industry, and then signed a statement that he had never seen the existence of Bud's idea in the transportation industry before. In a few weeks, David received another phone call from Bud and this time with a request to conference call a lawyer named Phillips a few hours later. Lawyer Phil presented an inquiry letter from the patent administration branch of certain government branch asking why Bud's patent application was unique and in which area was it different from the ideas of Gupta, Adams, Rodriguez and Kane . . . David assured lawyer Phil, "Oh, Bud's idea are different from ideas coming from all of them" and then he listed the reasons. Gupta's idea mentioned tracking devices, but it was proposing to use simple tracking with cell phone base stations not with GPS. Cell phone networks had many limitations in tracking vehicle positions, namely: not precise enough, no wide enough coverage, non-standardized; Adams, mentioned a server but did not specify the server as a web server connected to the Internet; Rodriguez was really mentioning how to use GIS system to calculate best available routes. It was too theoretical without calibration of the actual on the road vehicles; Kane's idea was actually referring to more expensive technology using satellite communication, suitable for fleets with more sensitive missions such as those for the military transportation, etc. which would be very cost prohibitive to implement. David felt that he was really going to like the role of a technical expert for a lawyer. In today's world, even if someone come up with the exact same idea as that of Bud's, it is still going to be easy to pin point subtle differences between the two ideas, for the simple reason of "there are different ways to skin a cat". Not any two persons can accomplish the same goal with exactly the same procedure even though they intended to. Therefore David felt he could wholeheartedly supported Bud's application for his new and creative idea even though he doubt the value of such a patent. But on the other hand, David wondered when people come up with good ideas that are marginally better than other people's ideas, what is the point of applying for patents? Did Einstein assert patents for the theory of relativity, or did Isaac Newton forbid other people from using Newtonian physics equations without paying him a royalty? Newton probably did, since he was known as a mean human being in the scientific community. He persecuted Leibniz for theory of probability or calculus, one thing or another like a corrupted governmental official. He didn't seem like a nice guy. Maybe, this willingness to share knowledge in technology advancement with fellow human being is completely voluntary. Some people are willing to do it like Linus Torvald, and some others are just very stingy about it. For people who are so "copy right", "intellectual property" and "law suite" oriented for small ideas, they reminded David of another Seinfeld episode where everyone asserted "hey, that's my move! If you want to do it out of town, that's fine" Yada, yada, yada. In the old days, patents were effective in this "town" or "country" domain, therefore each country and area had its own registration, even for the same idea. All the patent offices are still going to last for many, many years to come and they will still collect a lot of application fees from their believers. But what percentage of patents is truly meaningful after Internet and Open source movements? It is as significant as other questions like: "how many scientific research papers are really changing people's lives", or "how many religious studies truly reveal the spirits of the true God", which would get never ending debatable answers. For the time being, David was quite thankful for the patent system though, which was helping him get a few hundred bucks along with business opportunities to associate with Bud Westwood and his other business activities. Similar to patent, software product paid per copy, is another item David started to lose faith in because of the industry changes that he had witnessed over the last decade. In David's view, the models of paid commercial software packages are drastically reshaped by the recent and ever changing Internet landscape. The ease of developing and distributing open source software over the Internet had made it very touch for software developers to work in the old Silicon Valley motto, which was "lock some geeks in a dark room, pour some money over it and see what kind of fruits grow out of it". Since paid commercial software products are going to co-exist with free open source products for a long time in the future, David is not about to suggest everyone of his employers and colleagues to use free open source product yet. Since not everyone would be tech savvy enough to handle open source software well enough, there are still a large number of people in American corporate world believe in software products developed by "locked up geeks" coming from a black box. With reservations about Bud's practice in technology issues, David was still eager to work with him because he was really desperate for some cash. Several weeks later after the patent conversation, Bud regarded David as a knowledgeable, trustworthy and responsible enough professional to cooperate with; therefore he invited David to Houston for a software development project, not only for his own restaurants, but also for the Burrito House franchise. Through introduction of Bud, a not so insignificant franchisee of the Burrito House, David went interviewing with the IT department of the Burrito House headquarter personnel and got the nod to lead the development effort of a point of sale (POS) system. Bud as a technology professional himself in his previous life before working for the restaurant business, became the steering force to define the project requirements for the new system and served as the liaison between David and his team of developers. The team of developers consists of several junior developers from Burrito House and some other short-term but experienced contractors recruited by David among his past colleagues to work from remote locations. With this initial contract to help David getting started, he set out to move back gradually to the attractive American market for his future career. It was said that the American economy is booming again on another upswing period of the economic cycle. At any of these upswing periods, there is usually one sector triggering all other sectors which lead to the new economic revitalization. This time, it was said to be the housing market and real estate sales. High house prices are literally going through the "roof" of the houses, as realtors pointed out. Realtors are funny guys and gals. They are usually equipped with two sets of reasons to say "it's a great time to buy" to their buyers and sellers at any moment. During economic downtimes they would say, "Wow, it's a buyer's market. Housing prices are so low"; and during economic boom times they would say: "Wow, interest rates are so low. Your mortgage will be so affordable no matter how big a house you pick". |
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