So I was reading the background on Toybox and it’s definitely…interesting? Seems like the author used to work on BusyBox, had a falling out, then in a fit of pique wrote a permissively licensed version?
IIRC busybox became part of some GPL enforcement lawsuit(s) because it was being packaged in a lot of embedded situations without the necessary source-publishing.
So the author split off to work on toybox instead, a new implementation under permissive licensing.
I guess it just goes to show you should pick licenses that actually reflect what you want to happen to your code.
Busybox was written by Bruce Perens. The goal was to fit a whole Linux system onto a floppy disk for rescue disks and installers. Busybox licensed under GPL was not an accident. The kernel was GPL of course, but the rest of the userland was either GNU or largely GNU-inspired. Bruce Perens was heavily involved in early Debian development and even led the project for a while. "Copyleft" is at the core of how Debian operates.
Busybox being GPL licensed was in no way an accident or frivolous decision. It is still licensed under GPLv2 to this day.
I don't know when Rob Landley became involved in Busybox, and I don't know what drama resulted in the reimplementation of Toybox but I do remember he started it with hope that it would eventually ship on Android smartphones. I guess it worked out okay for him, because now he gets paid by Google to work on Toybox.
> Busybox being GPL licensed was in no way an accident or frivolous decision. It is still licensed under GPLv2 to this day.
I realise that my comment is quite ambiguous now. The author I referred to was the author of toybox, Rob Landley, and he was the maintainer of busybox in the early 00s. It was him I meant should pick licenses carefully, but honestly reading more about the situation, my take was too simplistic.
And that's about the time Rob resigned and went off to do toybox on his own. Having read that I'm honestly much more sympathetic, it seems like it was a real mess.
