Industrial Soul

Time passed quickly amidst the busyness. With Lin Baijie, Huang Weichang, and others keeping an eye on things, there was no need for him to personally handle the miscellaneous affairs of the company and the factory.

Having been freed up, Huang Xiuyuan had not been idle these past few days; he and Lu Xuedong had been discussing technical matters.

Although the laboratory he required was not yet finished, that did not mean he could not get things done.

Regarding the software laboratory, engineers from Inspur had already arrived from Pengcheng and begun setting up a server cluster.

Currently, Lu Xuedong and he were busy building the company's official website and developing some practical small programs for use on internal computers.

To increase their manpower, he instructed Lin Baijie that they could recruit some fresh graduates in computer programming, materials science, chemistry, and polymer materials as interns for the company.

While busy writing software, Huang Xiuyuan referenced quite a few foreign industrial design software packages.

For example, Autodesk Moldflow Adviser, as part of the Autodesk digital prototyping solution, could perform simulation assessments and optimization processing on design plans before manufacturing, reducing potential design errors, shortening product development cycles, and lowering development costs.

Also produced by Autodesk, AutoCAD is an automated computer-aided design software that can be used for drafting, 2D drawing, and basic 3D design; through it, one can create automatic drawings without needing to know how to program.

Therefore, it is widely used globally and can be applied in many fields such as civil engineering, interior decoration, industrial drafting, engineering drawing, the electronics industry, and garment processing.

The Pro/Engineer operating software under PTC is a 3D software that integrates CAD/CAM/CAE.

Pro/Engineer software is known for its parameterization and was the earliest adopter of parametric technology, occupying an important position in the current field of 3D modeling software.

As the new standard in the world's mechanical CAD/CAE/CAM field, it has been recognized and promoted by the industry and is one of the mainstream CAD/CAM/CAE software packages today, especially occupying a significant position in the product design field within China.

Added to this were SolidWorks (developed by a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes), Unigraphics NX (Siemens), Cimatron (Cimatron), Mastercam (CNC Software), CATIA (Dassault Systemes), Delcam (Delcam), and Edgecam (Vero Software), among this series of industrial design software.

Using these software packages as references, combined with his own experience participating in industrial software in his later life, he rewrote a new industrial software platform.

This new industrial software platform was equivalent to an industrial software library, and it was quite strenuous for him to write it alone.

Currently, he could only "borrow" foreign software, using foreign industrial software as a master copy to conduct secondary development, adding quite a few future industrial software programs as well as some improvements and optimizations.

In fact, many of the optimization plans were future improvements and optimizations from these foreign companies; Huang Xiuyuan, not wanting to be held back by others, adopted a "take-it-ism" approach.

Since the other parties hadn't developed them yet, he would bring them out first, and by preemptively registering patents, he could, to a certain extent, achieve the effect of checking and balancing the foreigners.

It was just that the current industrial software platform still had a long way to go. It was fine for his own use, but if he wanted to promote it externally, the patent barriers of the foreigners were no joke; he would be slapped with a court summons in a heartbeat.

As for the idea of ignoring patents, unless one had the strength to flip the table, it was better to be cautious.

The pieced-together industrial software platform currently had a total of eight sub-software programs.

Among them, two sub-software programs, because he was more familiar with them and had participated in their design in the future, had reached localization levels of 27% and 22% respectively.

The localization levels of the other sub-software programs appeared very weak, at most only between 1% and 3%, having only undergone preliminary Chinese localization of the English versions.

Huang Xiuyuan was not disappointed by this; once he recruited enough programmers and engineers, the comprehensive localization of the software was an inevitable strategy he had formulated.

Fortunately, patents in software were not difficult to bypass, unlike hardware patents, where many hardware items had a pile of patents, many of which were fundamental patents that could not be bypassed.

Although industrial software is different from general civilian commercial software, Huang Xiuyuan was still confident that he could stand toe-to-toe with foreign companies.

Generally, as long as self-owned patents account for about 30% of the software's overall patents, it is basically possible to achieve mutual patent exemption.

That is, between companies of the same type, because they have used each other's patents, both sides reach a relative balance in patents and can only exempt the other party from using their own patents.

Similar to the relationship between Huawei and Qualcomm, on one hand, it can curb the other party's patent barriers, and on the other hand, it can reduce patent usage costs.

Huang Xiuyuan intended to use this method to preemptively register a large number of patents, forming a patent moat, and perhaps he could even turn the tables and collect patent fees from the other side.

This was walking on others' paths, leaving them with nowhere to go.

In fact, for software-related technologies, as long as one is determined and has the people and money, there is nothing impossible about achieving localized substitution.

Referring to the situation of commercial software, one can basically discover a problem, which is that "borrowing" is rampant in this industry.

It is precisely because software patents are difficult to protect from imitation, and it is also difficult to sue the other party for patent infringement based on their imitation.

To give an example, suppose Company A developed a software that achieves a functional APP through AB+BB programming; on the other side, Company B sees that this software is good, so it has its programmers achieve a similar functional APP through B+B+A+B.

Did Company B violate patent law in this process?

The answer is: No.

Because functions cannot be patented; the part that can be patented is the way the function is realized, i.e., technical innovation.

And software programming is not like chemical materials; bypassing patents is not a difficult task.

Perhaps industrial software patents have some patent difficulties, but they are only somewhat troublesome and have not reached the point of being arduous.

The real difficulty restricting domestic industrial software is not a technical one, but the market and ecosystem of the software.

Industrial software is different from commercial software; industrial software is very closed, and developing industrial software requires having significant industrial design experience oneself.

In this regard, Western countries have a clear first-mover advantage, and by occupying the market and having a solid ecosystem, it is difficult for latecomers to intervene in this market.

Huang Xiuyuan had intended to start anew from the beginning, so naturally, he would not forget the issue of industrial software.

If he did not use his own industrial software from the start and relied too much on foreign software, it would be a major blow to change it later.

Just as he was about to say something to Lu Xuedong, the phone in his pocket vibrated.

He looked and saw it was a call from his dad. He looked up, and the wall clock was stopped near 4:42.

"Dad, I'll be there soon."

"You kid, I knew you'd forget. Drive slowly."

After hanging up the phone, he hurriedly gave a few instructions and then had his two bodyguards drive him toward the Urban Passenger Station.

Thank you all for your support (ω｀), and thanks to book friends "Hongdao A", "Xiaoyao G Gongzi", "Qinglai", "Yuming Daoren", and "Huaqian Yuexia" for their tips!