As part of transitioning the software into an open source community project, the codebase was moved to SourceForge for revision control in July 2000, then re-licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License with version 1.5pre7 in August 2001.

Version 3.0 of Netatalk was released in July 2012 and added ini style configuration, and Mac OS X compatible Extended Attributes as default, while removing AppleTalk networking support.

[8][9] A subsequent bugfix release added support for AFP level 3.4 (introduced in OS X Mountain Lion) which is the final revision of the protocol from Apple.

In all Netatalk versions except the 3.x release series, the AppleTalk (DDP) protocol suite is used to allow Unix-like operating systems to serve also as print (PAP via a CUPS backend) and time (Timelord)[10] servers for Macintosh computers.

[18] The company merged with German Samba vendor SerNet in December 2013, signaling the end of commercial support for Netatalk in favor of SMB, which Apple had made the primary file sharing protocol with the release of Mac OS X Mavericks that same year.

While a project at the University of Michigan, Netatalk's logo was the head of the BSD Daemon on a daisy chained serving tray, mimicking the icon design language that Apple used for AppleTalk and AppleShare in Classic Mac OS.