I'm undecided on my view about patents since I'm currently working in two areas.
One dedicated to making stuff for filing patents and the other purely for publication.
I much prefer the latter since I don't think the former will benefit me in terms of the patent(s) being licensed and making me £££, if it does then great but I don't enjoy it as much. I like doing research and having the chance to publish and let the world know about it, even if it isn't really of much interest to most of the scientific community, but that's the case with most research areas.