Re: "Private Foundation-List" Petition for referendum

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    To deny a group or a person the legitimacy to keep intellectual property
    proprietary goes against criteria five of the Open Source Definition:

A statement that uses the term "intellectual property" is tremendously
vague, since that refers to many laws at once, and treats them as one
single issue.  See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more
explanation of this.

Thus, when you say "intellectual property" here, I need to ask what
you are concretelt talking about.  Program source code?  Mailing list
messages?  Something else?

    I conclude that would the Free Software Foundation's (= your) ethics
    have been written down in the form of a license, that it wouldn't be
    compatible with the Open Source Definition at all.

You're talking about the OSI's criteria for software licenses,

The FSF does not agree with open source, so we don't try to follow any
of the criteria of open source.  We judge software licenses by the
Free Software Definition.

But it makes no sense to apply a license criterion to ethical views.

The Free Software Definition criteria for licenses reflect our ethical
views.  We use them to judge software licenses, but judging other
ethical questions is a different matter.

    You, however, as as head of the FSF, claim that proprietary software is
    illegitimate. Meaning that you say that it's 'unlawful' under FSF's
    ethical code.

An ethical principle is not a license.  A license is a legal
requirement, and ethics are ideas of right and wrong.  They are
different; if you identify them the result is confusion.

For instance, the ACLU calls Nazism unethical, and opposes censorship
of Nazism.  If you try to "write down ethics as a license", you would
transcribe the ACLU's ethical view "Nazism is wrong" into a
nonexistent "license requirement" forbidding Nazism, and that would
disagree squarely with the ACLU's real position.