All these complex licences (GPL2, GPL3, LGPL, Least GPL, etc) do nothing except create confusion about which license to use. I have found a simple solution that allows me to focus on my work and not on the legalese; I just use the MIT license.
As the author of the article said, it's a tool, and you may or may not use it. Don't downplay the need for a copyleft licence (which a cool hack around copyright, if you ask me): some people use is from a philosophical reason, and some - as the basis for their entire business model.
The principles of copyleft are tremendously valuable, I just wish we had a modern license that reflected the reality of the modern internet, and modern software.
About the ambiguity - my feeling about it is that they (Stallman and the lawyers, I suppose) leaned towards the usual way these documents are done, to make the licence more general - which irks us, the programmers. For a lawyer, "the code" is a good enough term.
I agree with you on having a new copyleft licence - but I'm afraid is hard to get something even to match GPL, and worse - you can step in the same, or other subtle traps as the initial versions of the GPL did - that tivoization stuff was nasty as hell. If only some of the licenses would "die" eventually, but the process reminds me of this comic - https://xkcd.com/927/
That's good, but there other options too that are practically similar to MIT. Most notably, the APL (Apache Public License), MPL (Mozilla Public License) and even the old BSD public license. They just differ in legal gobbledegook in their content, but essentially, you can pick and use any software under these terms and you can use/modify them in whatever manner with a peace of mind!
APL more explicitly/specifically transfers the legal rights to the user of the software through the legal wordings used. In this manner, APL is an improvement over the MIT, which in turn, is an improvement over good old BSD license. Even BSD license intended to do the same thing, but it appears that the modern law prefers every intention to be explicitly stated, rather than leaving room for assumption/derivation of that intent.
http://opensource.org/licenses/apachepl.php
The particular license is just "Apache License" or ASL, in fact.
MIT: Do whatever you want
BSD: Do whatever you want, don't use our name
APL: Do whatever you want, don't sue us for patents
MPL: Do whatever you want, as long as you release modifications to the original source files
LGPL: You can use this as long as you publish changes to the library and dynamically link it in software with a non-(L)GPL license.
GPL: Any source code connected to this to this code must also be GPL.
* or, crazily enough, provide an object file or files that you can re-statically link against the LGPLed source.