I think this is the right way to go. Short of the argument against patenting math, I think you're hard-pressed to find anything that parallels pharma or hard-goods patents in software.
But with software should go business-process patents, which suffer from the same "patent a way of doing things" problems. Patents do well to cover the result of a process, and shouldn't cover the process itself. In software, you can have two patents end up with the same result, as long as they arrive there by different paths.
With hard goods, you invent inline skates. Someone can't declare another patent arriving at the same result but using a different manufacturing process to create inline skates.
But with software should go business-process patents, which suffer from the same "patent a way of doing things" problems. Patents do well to cover the result of a process, and shouldn't cover the process itself. In software, you can have two patents end up with the same result, as long as they arrive there by different paths.
With hard goods, you invent inline skates. Someone can't declare another patent arriving at the same result but using a different manufacturing process to create inline skates.