4 ms·

They're not totally unrelated to the license - all the good code is GPL, and hardware manufacturers sometimes would rather create an insecure software solution

by oakwhiz 13y ago

They're not totally unrelated to the license - all the good code is GPL, and hardware manufacturers sometimes would rather create an insecure software solution than use GPL code. If somewhat good BSD code is available, manufacturers will use it instead, and it will reduce the attack surface of many embedded systems.

drdaeman 13y ago
Do you know any such example of manufacturer reimplementing POSIX userspace from scratch instead of using GNU coreutils or Busybox? Sometimes vendors do not use POSIX userspace altogether by providing big-proprietary-init blob (LG TVs do), but that's irrelevant to Busybox vs Toybox debate.
- oakwhiz 13y ago
  I do know that a lot of manufacturers use Vxworks instead of Linux for embedded systems, I'm not sure what they use for userland though
  - adestefan 13y ago
    vxWorks doesn't really have a userland. However, they do implement certain POSIX APIs and those are all homegrown.
synchronise 13y ago
'all the good code is GPL' is a pretty unrealistic claim to make.
- oakwhiz 13y ago
  I agree with this.
binarycrusader 13y ago
all the good code is GPL Yeah, like the Apache web server, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, most of the software released by the Internet Software Consortium, LLVM, SDL, Ogre3D, Xorg, Python, Perl, Django, V8, Lua, Mesa, CEGUI, JQuery, CURL, Sass, Groovy, and LESS among others. You're right, all of the good code is GPL -- oh wait, none of those are. I guess that code's no good.