Toybox vs BusyBox - Rob Landley, hobbyist
Toybox vs BusyBox - Rob Landley, hobbyist on HackerTube: recommended by 5 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2020–2025.
Rob Landley compares Toybox and BusyBox and surveys options for embedded system command-line tools, including GNU. He also tells the story of leaving BusyBox, Toybox becoming Android's command line, and licensing.
What HN commenters said
8 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
bsimpsonDec 2025Strongly recommends
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: ▶ 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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coffeebeanHHOct 2025Recommends
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] ▶ this video [2] [link]
in “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line” · View on HN
freemintMar 2022Recommends
A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here ▶ this video
in “The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name” · View on HN
freemintMar 2022Recommends
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 ▶ this video (worth the hour, althoug Rob Landley write the same thing on his website too but to lazy to Google that.
in “The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name” · View on HN
tlamponiSep 2021Recommends
> 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 ▶ this video
in “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line” · View on HN
CianticSep 2021Recommends
I dug up one of his latest YouTube videos, which I think as a whole is good watch. Here is the licensing part: - ▶ 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.
in “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line” · View on HN
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CianticSep 2021Cites it
I think with "few lines of codes as possible" he wants auditability. Rob mentions it as something of a feature: ▶ 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.
in “Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line” · View on HN
freemintNov 2020Cites it
This is a bad idea. All licenses released under GPLvX or later where X<4 will be not affected by this as the company could always pick X. It would further increase license fragmentation in the GPL sphere which is one of the reasons why BSD style licenses became more popular. I'd recommend looking into Rob Landley and why he created 0BSD. [1] The whole reason why we are in this mess and why GPL died is because the people behind GPL wanted to push their political views using the weight of persons using GPLv2 or later. The Linux kernel reacted by switching GPLv2 only. The only reason why would might want to name it GPLv4 is to use the 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] ▶ this video somewhere around 25 min it starts
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