From f3b9fd4ec2bdc7f77ecfe52aa9f3e671e325a8e5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rob Landley Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 02:50:15 -0500 Subject: Somebody asked a FAQ on irc, so answer it. --- www/faq.html | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 42 insertions(+) create mode 100755 www/faq.html 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 @@ +toybox news + + +

Q: "Why is there toybox? What was wrong with busybox?"

+ +

A: To answer the first part: Toybox dates back to when its maintainer +handed off BusyBox maintainership +and started over from +scratch on a new codebase after a +protracted licensing argument took all the fun out of +working on BusyBox. Toybox was just a personal project until it got +relicensed years +later after its author did a lot of thinking +about licenses +and about the +transition to smartphones. This led to the +2013 +talk laying +out a strategy to make Android self-hosting, which helped +bring +it to Android's attention, and they +merged it into Android M.

+ +

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 explicitly +discourages 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, +and so +on. 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, +see here.)

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