>> Discouraging people from exploring ideas and building things 'because its patented' is fundamentally wrong.
Who's discouraging? Being aware that it's highly patented doesn't mean you shouldn't play around with it, it just means that you probably shouldn't be trying to make money off of someone else's work.
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.
I agree with the first part, and disagree with the second part of your statement.
Just because there are patents doesn't mean a person can't play around and even try to make money off of their work. It just means they need to do a little bit of investigation before trying to monetize their work.
Who's discouraging? Being aware that it's highly patented doesn't mean you shouldn't play around with it, it just means that you probably shouldn't be trying to make money off of someone else's work.