The thing with software patents though is that most of the time they've preventing you from making money off of your own work, just because someone at one point

The thing with software patents though is that most of the time they've preventing you from making money off of your own work, just because someone at one point did that same work first. Patents are needed in industries where r&d is expensive enough to warrant protecting inventors for a sizeable time so they can recoup their investment. Software r&d is too cheap for patents on software to do anything but harm. As a quick rule of thumb, whenever people are being advised never to look at patents, as they are in software, that's when those patents do more harm than good.