The Linux Foundation
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2025
51:43 · 25K views · Oct 2, 2019
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.
HN recommends it for the toybox intro and for Landley's candid account of software licensing and why he created the 0BSD license.
8 comments from Hacker News
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.)
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.
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]
> 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
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.