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Toybox vs BusyBox - Rob Landley, hobbyist

The Linux Foundation

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YouTube
  • Recommended by 5 people: 5 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2021 to 2025.
  • Presented by Rob Landley, creator of Toybox
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

25K views7 years ago5 recommendations

Systems programmingTools and practiceLinuxOperating systemsOpen source

Rob Landley compares Toybox and BusyBox, detailing the history of embedded Linux command-line tools and his shift from GPL to permissive licensing.

Toybox vs BusyBox - Rob Landley, hobbyist Once upon a time, the maintainer of BusyBox left that project and started over from scratch. The new project, toybox, became the Android command line in 2015, and after a dozen years of development is closing in on a 1.0 release.So why would you use toybox instead of busybox, the gnu tools, or something else? When you build an embedded system, what are your options and what do they mean? This talk is an attempt to survey, compare, and contrast.

Why it's here

5 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its historical context on BusyBox, Toybox, and the practical realities of open-source licensing lawsuits.

bsimpsonon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ghostty is now non-profit”

BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal. You should watch his talk: link to this video (He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
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tlamponion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line”

> Toybox's main goal is to make Android self-hosting by improving Android's command line utilities so it can build an installable Android Open Source Project image entirely from source under a stock Android system. -- link Possibly also interesting: Toyboy vs. Busybox link to this video
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Cianticon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line”

I dug up one of his latest YouTube videos, which I think as a whole is good watch. Here is the licensing part: - link to this video (at 25:25) Also I think it's worth to listen the first 10 minutes as an intro, and brief about licensing from 5 minutes forward. Where he explains how BusyBox's licensing was then used by other people as "beating tool" to get hardware specs.
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freeminton Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name”

A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here link to this video
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freeminton Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name”

Yes. At least if you want people who have to talk to lawyers to use the code. Lawyers don't like that. For some anecdotes see this talk link to this video (worth the hour, althoug Rob Landley write the same thing on his website too but to lazy to Google that.
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coffeebeanHHon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line”

It's sort of a remastered Version of busybox. Please refer to Rob himself for explaining. There's a good intro on yt 1 and a "demo" in 2 edit: Well Sorry, 2 was about mkroot. I just skipped through the video. I thought it was related to toybox/busybox. Maybe somewhere in the talk. Has been a while since I last watched it. 1 link to this video 2 link
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freeminton Hacker News • Mentions

On “No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This”

…weight of code of GPLvX or later people. Don't do that In addition some of you clauses have been shown to be easily enforceable by laws like GDPR and attempting to use contract is a crutch. They way to some of your points is phrased might be unenforceable in court and might void the complete license if it is ever testing in court. -> very bad 1 link to this video somewhere around 25 min it starts…
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Cianticon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line”

I think with "few lines of codes as possible" he wants auditability. Rob mentions it as something of a feature: link to this video about 12 minute mark, he mentions how people used BusyBox in US army because they wanted to audit all the code, and this was his realization. I think it's a worthy goal. But surely if bc is missing some useful features there is probably no harm having multiple implementations.
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