Toybox

Toybox is an implementation of some Linux command line utilities. These include ls, cp, mv, and about 150 others. The Toybox project was started in 2006, and became a BSD-licensed BusyBox alternative. Toybox is included with Android 6.0 "Marshmallow" and all later Android versions, and is also available for installation on certain other operating systems.

Toybox aims on providing a BSD licensed replacement for the GPL licensed Busybox. Toybox's major technical design goals are simplicity, smallness, speed and standard compliance. Toybox is POSIX-2008 and LSB 4.1 compatible, and doesn't focus on having every option found in GNU counterparts.

Toybox is licensed using the permissive BSD license, where BusyBox uses the copyleft GNU General Public License, which lead to different usage domains. Busybox is mostly used in the copyleft FOSS domain, while Toybox is used mostly with permissive licensed projects and by commercial companies (e.g. Google's Android which is an explicit target of toybox). Feature-wise Toybox has not reached parity with Busybox, Toybox offers currently only a subset of the Busybox functionality.

In early 2006 Toybox was started by Rob Landley after he ended his BusyBox maintainership due to a dispute with Bruce Perens, the original creator of BusyBox. In 2008 the project went dormant. At the end of 2011, Tim Bird, a Sony employee suggested to create an alternative to BusyBox which would not be under the GNU General Public License. Rob Landley followed the request and suggested instead to base this library on the dormant Toybox. He re-licensed ToyBox from the GNU General Public License to the BSD License, and took up the Toybox development again.