You're correct, with MIT there are a lot less restrictions. I can make GPL or pretty much any other license. Including one that I sell and never have to release the source of.

The latter option means if you make a product off of it, you have no obligation to share or even fund upstream development. This kind of situation has strangled other products.

Consider if Linux was released under MIT. Then companies like Oracle and RedHat (now owned by IBM) who have strong incentives to keep improvements to themselves and fund a lot of development would never share those improvements. Linux is the most used operating system in the world because of _everyone_ contributing back. But a MBA would want to privitize the profits.

If you care about the long term openness of a product, then GPL is hard to beat.

Quite the opposite. We care about these freedoms enough that we want everyone to enjoy them. We don't want a third party to take this work and use it to lock more people into their proprietary software.

The ideological split likely comes from whether you care more about developers having the freedom to do whatever they want, or do you care about users having access to software which works the way they want it to.

No you can't. MIT requires attribution.