The ethics of the MIT era referenced in the article are encoded in the MIT license. The ideals are those of Open Source: that software is best developed collaboratively.
RMS believe cares less about developers and more about users. The 4 freedoms talk about the ability to inspect and improve the source code but permissive licenses allow that as well. What makes the GPL unique are the rights it gives to users that are not writing the code. The GPL guarantees that users will get all the code developers write in the future, even if they have not contributed any themselves.