Hey maybe if your whole deal is about the GPL you should title your long article "The GPL is etc" instead of using and then narrowly defining a broader label that makes it inflammatory bait.

in nearly every Free Software project which exists today, there is a clear “owner” of the software

Not remotely the same thing. Nobody can stop you from forking Linux. Several efforts have been made to replace the kernel with other philosophical approaches, other languages, other licenses, or straight-up other operating systems. They're relatively obscure because the initial collaborative project works. I don't even have to get into projects where a fork has overtaken the initial effort, or projects where the BDFL has stepped down and a committee directs the community's development. Linux is a wild success story, in part because of the monumental difficulty of replacing and maintaining the once very well-funded entire Unix ecosystem.

Stallman does exactly what he shunned in Why Software Should Be Free.

Not the same thing, to such an extent that the author's just lying. Expecting all software to be out of anyone's control is not enforcing control. Fuck off if you even need that explained. Demanding software freedom is not some emotional attachment. It's everything the author allegedly endorsed, two paragraphs earlier. RMS doesn't just want his software to be free-or-else. He wants all software to be free-or-else. The GPL is just a foothold toward that no-masters goal, using and subverting the laws protecting proprietary software.

the GPL has become so complicated

If what you're doing is also GPL then there's no problem. Which is the entire fucking point. You only need to lawyer up if you're playing stupid games, like putting modifiable software in an unmodifiable box, or keeping your changes secret because people access your copy remotely. Just make a good-faith effort and nobody will give you any shit.

While I don’t agree with proprietary software as a concept, the fact that even lawyers—who are supposed to be expertly trained in the kind of language used in the license—are uneasy about its terms

Working as intended. You idiot. What does being against proprietary software mean, if you can't recognize that the license says 'you have to stop doing proprietary software, to benefit from all this code you plainly want?' Those expert lawyers correctly understand that requirement. They're only "uneasy" when management asks them how to have the cake and eat it too.

It has become especially clear how few people actually understand what the GPL does and does not permit based on the responses to changes that Red Hat made to how they offer their source code

Stupid games, aforementioned. Red Hat's fuckery should lead to a GPLv4 decisively shutting the loophole they have abused. You can't bitch about gaps in the license and also bitch about fixing those gaps.

all because a manufacturer put Linux in their products and blocked users from running their own modified software on that hardware. The absurdity of this line of thinking is compounded by the fact that this had absolutely nothing to do with the Linux kernel since it’s the system’s firmware that would stop users from running different software.

Stopped reading. The author proclaims philosophical agreement, then fumbles their actual beliefs at every turn.

What... the fuck... do you think Stallman was against... if not locked-down firmware? What was all of this about, besides users controlling software on the computers they bought and own?