By the way, I think I've omitted something from the discussion until now that may help you understand why the GPL was perceived as the right license at the right time for Netatalk.
The initial influx of developers after Netatalk's long moribund state was mostly caused by community discussion of the CNID issue. As users' hard drive sizes increased, more files were stored which increased the likelihood of triggering the bug which resulted in data loss. So more and more people hit the mailing list, wondering what was going on, what was going to be done about it, and were very anxious because not only was it a data loss bug, but a silent data loss bug. Even if users kept backups, they wouldn't know to use them unless they happened to notice a file was gone. This made Netatalk feel like a ticking time bomb. As the conversation's pace quickened, it attracted a handful of new developers who had a stake in Netatalk's success.
As users compared notes and the new devs ran tests, they learned, as mentioned before, that some storage vendors had been aware of and resolved the issue in their products, but refused to share the fixes. Users who had lost files became angry. Why? The feeling was that these vendors had benefited from Netatalk for a long time, and now when the community needed help, the vendors were turning their backs on them.
I think anger was an understandable reaction. After all, we're not talking about users missing out on some whiz-bang feature. If a cool new feature on your iPod is steak, then data integrity in a fileserver is water -- you can't live without it. Users were dying of thirst while the storage vendors were chasing them away from their freshwater wells. And so the community reacted, and decided that instead of hoping for the goodwill of others, a different license would be used to guarantee it.
So, yes, a group of BSD-lovin' devs could have written the code, and we might be where we are today. But the community felt it had been taken advantage of under the liberal license, and reacted to prevent a repeat.
In hindsight, the LGPL might've been a better license for libatalk by encouraging corporate use and development, but I'm not sure, and I don't know if that would've mollified the fans of liberal licenses anyway -- not that that latter point actually matters.
The initial influx of developers after Netatalk's long moribund state was mostly caused by community discussion of the CNID issue. As users' hard drive sizes increased, more files were stored which increased the likelihood of triggering the bug which resulted in data loss. So more and more people hit the mailing list, wondering what was going on, what was going to be done about it, and were very anxious because not only was it a data loss bug, but a silent data loss bug. Even if users kept backups, they wouldn't know to use them unless they happened to notice a file was gone. This made Netatalk feel like a ticking time bomb. As the conversation's pace quickened, it attracted a handful of new developers who had a stake in Netatalk's success.
As users compared notes and the new devs ran tests, they learned, as mentioned before, that some storage vendors had been aware of and resolved the issue in their products, but refused to share the fixes. Users who had lost files became angry. Why? The feeling was that these vendors had benefited from Netatalk for a long time, and now when the community needed help, the vendors were turning their backs on them.
I think anger was an understandable reaction. After all, we're not talking about users missing out on some whiz-bang feature. If a cool new feature on your iPod is steak, then data integrity in a fileserver is water -- you can't live without it. Users were dying of thirst while the storage vendors were chasing them away from their freshwater wells. And so the community reacted, and decided that instead of hoping for the goodwill of others, a different license would be used to guarantee it.
So, yes, a group of BSD-lovin' devs could have written the code, and we might be where we are today. But the community felt it had been taken advantage of under the liberal license, and reacted to prevent a repeat.
In hindsight, the LGPL might've been a better license for libatalk by encouraging corporate use and development, but I'm not sure, and I don't know if that would've mollified the fans of liberal licenses anyway -- not that that latter point actually matters.