15 Facts About BusyBox

BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file.

Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1995 and declared complete for his intended usage in 1996, BusyBox initially aimed to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy disk that would serve both as a rescue disk and as an installer for the Debian distribution.

Since each Linux executable requires several kilobytes of overhead, having the BusyBox program combine over two hundred programs together often saves substantial disk space and system memory.

BusyBox was maintained by Enrique Zanardi and focused on the needs of the Debian boot-floppies installer system until early 1998, when Dave Cinege took it over for the Linux Router Project .

In September 2006, after heavy discussions and controversies between project maintainer Rob Landley and Bruce Perens, the BusyBox project decided against adopting the GNU Public License Version 3 ; the BusyBox license was clarified as being GPL-2.

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In late 2007, BusyBox came to prominence for actively prosecuting violations of the terms of its license in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

BusyBox can be customized to provide a subset of over two hundred utilities.

BusyBox uses the Almquist shell, known as A Shell, ash and sh.

BusyBox website provides a full list of the utilities implemented.

BusyBox is a single binary, which is a conglomerate of many applications, each of which can be accessed by calling the single BusyBox binary with various names in a specific manner with appropriate arguments.

Programs included in BusyBox can be run simply by adding their name as an argument to the BusyBox executable:.

BusyBox is used by several operating systems running on embedded systems and is an essential component of distributions such as OpenWrt, OpenEmbedded and Buildroot.

BusyBox is an essential component of VMware ESXi, and Alpine Linux, both of which are not embedded distributions.

In January 2012 the proposal of creating a BSD licensed alternative to the GPL licensed BusyBox project drew harsh criticism from Matthew Garrett for taking away the only relevant tool for copyright enforcement of the Software Freedom Conservancy group.

The starter of BusyBox based lawsuits, Rob Landley, responded that this was intentional as he came to the conclusion that the lawsuits resulted not in the hoped for positive outcomes and he wanted to stop them "in whatever way I see fit".