Private industry standard setting organizations, or consortia, operate under exemptions to the antitrust laws here in the US. Their behavior is still subject to the normal scrutiny for anticompetitive effects - things against which the antitrust laws can and supposedly do protect us.

Despite popular belief, GNU/Linux is not always synonymous with open source software. For example, in January 2004 IEEE and The Open Group okayed the 'Linux Manual Pages Project' to incorporate material from the POSIX® Standard, but they continued to deny use of the same material to the BSD community until June of 2004. Your rights don't automatically get respected because the GPL or Linux is afforded some opportunity, and no patents are involved.

Its important to remember that while the GPL is an OSI approved license, it is not a non-discriminatory one. It discriminates against a whole range of perfectly legal proprietary licensing rights. The GNU organization even maintains its own list of incompatible free software licenses. In the past, neither of these private organizations has offered open enrollment for memberships with voting rights. There is no prospect that situation will change, or that they will become "open standards organizations". It certainly doesn't engender trust when leaders of those organizations publicly advocate the use of GPL IPR to encumber the use of open standards in software applications, e.g. OMG CORBA.

Private consortia developed "industry standards" become an illegal combination in restraint of trade whenever they are used to discriminate for anti-competitive reasons.

Richard Stallman doesn't hesitate to act as an adversary of certain proprietary interests. He has called for boycotts against Amazon for prosecuting a software patent, while ignoring a similar Priceline patent suit against Microsoft. He called for a boycott of Caldera products after their CEO said they were considering the use of the BSD license for their internal development in lieu of the GPL.

The GPL V2 doesn't really mean that GPL-only patent licenses are precluded when it says: "we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."

In fact several individuals discussed a plan to establish a GPL-only patent pool that would have excluded other open source developers. Here's how the proposed license was worded:

"This license grants holder the right to implement Patent 123456 in GPL'ed code. This license does not grant rights to implementing the algo in non-GPL'ed or proprietary code."

"A few patent holders have signed such licenses. This isn't really a pool, in the usual sense, because each patent is individually licensed to GPL-covered software."

"They've signed variants of such licenses, but there is no standard license text to attach a patent to (L)GPL software, in a way that the patent license applies only to (L)GPL software (and not BSD or proprietary software) and terminates if the (L)GPL terminates."

In one interview Stallman explained that patents should only be used defensively, but then discussed collecting money from non-members or refusing to license patents for the use of non-members who didn't own any patents that they could contribute to the pool:

"LinuxWorld: In one of your texts about patents at the Free Software Foundation site, you recommend that developers not get patents for their innovations. Would you still recommend that?

Richard M. Stallman: Yes. I think that [not getting software patents] is one good thing to do. The other good thing to do would be, if you are going to get a patent, to make a binding commitment to use it only for defense -- that is, either to push for cross-licensing or to put it in a patent pool.
...
LinuxWorld: The details of the pool seem kind of complicated, too. You can't just make them public-domain patents, because then you have no advantage over the others.

Richard M. Stallman: Right. You have to keep them active. And part of the problem is that it costs money to keep a patent active. And it can cost a lot of money. So people are torn between the idea of somehow licensing the patents to non-members for money, and thus getting the money to apply for patents and keep the patents going, versus the idea that you need to put pressure for people to join the pool.

And the way you put pressure on other companies to join the pool is by not letting them license these patents other than by joining. So it's difficult."

Bruce Perens co-founded OSI. The initial launch announcement explained "we have no plans to become a membership association (those are too complicated to run)." Perens also authored The Open Source Definition. On at least one occasion Bruce Perens has publicly called for packing "open enrollment" standards organizations in order to stack their voting process against adoption of RAND licensing terms [and thus ban GPL'ed standards].  

At the best of times that sort of thing is frowned upon. For example here is an extract of a US Supreme Court decision in ALLIED TUBE v. INDIAN HEAD (1988)

The National Electric Code is the most influential electrical code in the nation. A substantial number of state and local governments routinely adopt the Code into law. . . . Petitioner, the nation's largest producer of steel conduit, met to plan strategy with, among others, members of the steel industry, other steel conduit manufacturers, and its independent sales agents. They collectively agreed to exclude respondent's product from the 1981 Code by packing the upcoming annual meeting with new Association members whose only function would be to vote against the polyvinyl chloride proposal. . . . Concerted efforts to restrain or monopolize trade by petitioning government officials are protected from antitrust liability. . . The scope of this protection depends, however, on the source, context, and nature of the anticompetitive restraint at issue. . . . Here petitioner's actions took place within the context of the standard-setting process of a private association. That rounding up supporters is an acceptable and constitutionally protected method of influencing elections does not mean that rounding up economically interested persons to set private standards must also be protected. . . . Just as the antitrust laws should not regulate political activities "simply because those activities have a commercial impact," so the antitrust laws should not necessarily immunize what are in essence commercial activities simply because they have a political impact. . . . Our holding is expressly limited to cases where an "economically interested party exercises decisionmaking authority in formulating a product standard for a private association that comprises market participants." . . . Petitioner can avoid the strictures of the private standard-setting process by attempting to influence legislatures through other forums. What petitioner may not do (without exposing itself to possible antitrust liability for direct injuries) is bias the process by, as in this case, stacking the private standard-setting body with decisionmakers sharing their economic interest in restraining competition.