I suspect we talk about the GPL as programmers because the relative freedom level of a software license matters far more to us than it does to actual end users. Restrictions on what you can do with the source code only matter if you're both interested in and capable of modifying that source code. On a practical level, the Average Joe is "locked out" from modifying an application's source code by virtue of not being capable of performing that modification, not by the license. I have a lot of non-developer friends and acquaintances who use LibreOffice, and I can assure you that they're using it for the "free as in beer" aspect, not because of a philosophical attachment to free software. For most end users, freedom is contingent on data portability, not license terms: if I can open my word processing document or Photoshop file, it doesn't matter to me in practice whether the editor is open or closed source. If the application stops being developed, I can move to something else with minimal pain.

But if we're talking about tools for a developer audience--like RethinkDB, and frankly a whole lot of other open source software--then developers are the end users, and so the license really does matter. I've long thought that one of the strengths of the GPL is that it's more restrictive from a developer standpoint, rather than less. If I was trying to build a company around open source software, the (A)GPL would be attractive expressly because it makes it more difficult for competitors to build on. If the company goes away and there's no way for someone to buy a commercial license with a different set of restrictions, that can become an issue, as we've seen with RethinkDB -- but the (A)GPL isn't necessarily an impediment to strong community development, as we've seen with, well, a lot of other software over the last two decades.