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| author | Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> | 2016-07-15 02:50:15 -0500 |
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| committer | Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> | 2016-07-15 02:50:15 -0500 |
| commit | f3b9fd4ec2bdc7f77ecfe52aa9f3e671e325a8e5 (patch) | |
| tree | 7a413014a621a5fd3595c8654a810c3043fe8310 /www/faq.html | |
| parent | be6eb9841a781269265fee869c3324b91a170bcf (diff) | |
| download | toybox-f3b9fd4ec2bdc7f77ecfe52aa9f3e671e325a8e5.tar.gz | |
Somebody asked a FAQ on irc, so answer it.
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| -rwxr-xr-x | www/faq.html | 42 |
1 files changed, 42 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/www/faq.html b/www/faq.html new file mode 100755 index 00000000..52ea6f5b --- /dev/null +++ b/www/faq.html @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +<html><head><title>toybox news</title> +<!--#include file="header.html" --> + +<h2>Q: "Why is there toybox? What was wrong with busybox?"</h2> + +<p>A: To answer the first part: Toybox dates back to when its maintainer +<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/202106/>handed off BusyBox maintainership</a> +and <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#28-09-2006>started over from +scratch</a> on a new codebase after a +<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2006-September/058617.html>protracted licensing argument</a> took all the fun out of +working on BusyBox. Toybox was just a personal project until it got +<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/478308/>relicensed years +later</a> after its author did a lot of thinking +<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>about licenses</a> +and about <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#21-03-2011>the +transition to smartphones</a>. This led to the +<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>2013</a> +<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0>talk</a> laying +out a strategy to make Android self-hosting, which helped +<a href=https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=76861>bring +it to Android's attention</a>, and they +<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/>merged it</a> into Android M.</p> + +<p>To answer the second part: BusyBox predates Android +by almost a decade, but Android still doesn't ship with it because GPLv3 came +out around the same time Android did and caused many people to throw +out the GPLv2 baby with the GPLv3 bathwater. +Android <a href=https://source.android.com/source/licenses.html>explicitly +discourages</a> use of GPL and LGPL licenses in its products, and has gradually +reimplemented historical GPL components such as its bluetooth stack under the +Apache license. Similarly, Apple froze xcode at the last GPLv2 releases +(GCC 4.2.1 with binutils 2.17) for over 5 years while it sponsored the +development of new projects (clang/llvm/lld) to replace them, +implemented its SMB server from scratch to replace samba, +<a href=http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/>and so +on</a>. Toybox itself exists because somebody with in a legacy position +just wouldn't shut up about GPLv3, otherwise its maintainer would probably +still happily be maintaining BusyBox. (For more on how said maintainer wound +up working on busybox in the first place, +<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/history.html>see here</a>.)</p> + +<!--#include file="footer.html" --> |