Sorry, I’m often conscious that people tend not to read scads of text, so I over-edit what I say, to the detriment of its clarity. Particularly a bad choice in responding to someone who just wrote scads of text on the nature of religion in a Livejournal post.

I didn’t say the FSF was bad; I said its ethos was wrong, in at least that one aspect. I should have gone on to say that no-one is hurt by the existence of proprietary software, no-one is deprived of something they had already, and that software being proprietary has had benefits in areas like internationalisation, GUIs, and overall consistency that haven’t been practical with decentralised development by people working mainly through English, via the command line, with very strong individual opinions on how software should behave. “Unethical and simply wrong” is false.

Now, as I say, lots of the people who’ve signed up for the project are smart, passionate, and engaged. Smart, passionate, engaged people are never totally oblivious to details like this, by definition, especially not after years of engagement. I do not propose that they are wilfully ignoring a judgement that something is wrong; rather that they enjoy being part of the club, with good reason, and as a result don’t question its foundations with an independent clarity.

I think you're oversimplifying by insisting on seeing the issue from the point of view of harm as deprivation of things. As I understand the FSF's viewpoint, what's been lost is freedom. Specifically, the freedom to solve problems in a natural way sitting at your computer, by using the most appropriate combination of software and data to achieve a desired goal. The existence of proprietary software and arcane copyright restrictions means that when I sit and think about solutions to a problem, I have to evaluate every one in terms of its legality as well as its technical feasibility, and some courses of action which do not harm anybody in all the senses you list are nonetheless illegal.

Now the FSF will see that as a fundamental injustice whereas I see it as an annoying inconvenience. But it is something which is a restriction on the things I can do and the ways in which I can solve the problems that confront me on a day-to-day basis, and it is something which would not be there if it weren't for software copyright, so it is something you have to weigh up against the putative benefits, and although you might reasonably disagree with the FSF's conclusion that the benefits are not as large as they look and the loss of freedom is more important, I don't think you can reasonably consider it to be obviously false to anyone considering the issue with "an independent clarity".

I would point out that the existence of copyright for books means that some courses of action which do not harm anybody in the senses listed are nonetheless illegal, but Stallman doesn’t argue against copyright for books with anything like the vehemence he does for software.

The “freedom” thing, as the FSF argues it, is not honest, IMO. They resolutely fail to admit that the individual user of the BSD- or MIT-licensed software has more freedom than the user of the GPL. That the user can turn that freedom to ends that are not what the FSF would like, well, something similar has always been the consequence of actual freedom. If you’re a country and you open your borders, you run the risk of your best and brightest leaving to earn more money elsewhere; if you end prohibition of alcohol and gambling, you run more risk of having inveterate gamblers and alcoholics in your population.

Now, yes, the freedom of which the GPL deprives the user should be balanced against the freedom it grants; but they don’t even start. Whence, IMO, the dishonesty.

I’m going to shut up on this now, because I’ve thought it through already to my satisfaction, and I really dislike trying to get into Stallman’s frame of mind, both in reading his opinions on society and his Lisp and emacs documentation. I find him inarticulate, unclear and so often just wrong (“Of course C-h should be the primary documented way to invoke help! What, you say that every terminal in the world sends C-h for backspace? Then every terminal in the world should change! C-h for help makes perfect sense!”) that the effort versus the benefit rarely works out.

But, yeah, I accept that my example was badly chosen. I suppose it’s a symptom of my having talked about it with a limited number of people, so my appreciation of how other people understand it is not that complete.