Is the documentation publicly available by any chance?
7,418 karma · joined February 28, 2010
Email is deepankar.sharma at googles email service.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepankar-s-0176222/
In short I believe languages that one can pick up in a couple of days and then read code where reasoning of the code is highly local would stand a higher chance of being perceived as simple.
He also says - "but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns".
It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as possible. On this metric, yes BSD would have been a superior choice.