Bill Gates thanks God for commercial software.
(And I have heard that the Pope is a catholic too 
)It will ensure development in underdeveloped countries - he states. It might be argued that they do not primarily need to develop patent trolling and lawyers.
And that the underdeveloped countries developers cannot afford patents in any case.
In Europe it is the general sentiment that patenting algorithms will make any further development impossible. One single developer can never know if and when a big company is going to claim some degree of ownership of his coding.
Gates also has interesting views on Education and everything else