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Toybox vs BusyBox - Rob Landley, hobbyist

The Linux Foundation · 25.3K views · 2019-10-02 · 51:43

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it for the toybox intro and for Landley's candid account of software licensing and why he created the 0BSD license.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

Linux & open-source ecosystemsSoftware practice, open source & careersOperating systems & kernels
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toyboxbusyboxrob landley0bsdsoftware licensingembedded linux

What people said

bsimpson · 2025-12 · Strong recommendation

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: [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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coffeebeanHH · 2025-10 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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freemint · 2022-03 · Recommendation

A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by The Linux Foundation, played through YouTube.

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