It's not meaningless. If I give something away under certain conditions, I'm not forcing anybody to adhere to those conditions.

Instead, if they choose to adopt those conditions, they get free stuff from me (and a lot of other people.) In other words, it's an incentive program, not a requirement such as a law or regulation.

Yes, these two feel quite similar for me too, but the one "GPL forces you to licence your application under GPL." is quite different.

Both of your wordings are quite neutral, but this one contains in my opinion a quite strong negative element.

For me it was small, but important difference.