On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Dave Carlson wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 09 March 2005 20:03, Mike Miller wrote:
>>> I really want to hear from the people who say they run Linux without GNU 
>>> -
>>> where do you get the programs to replace ls, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, etc.?
>>> What do you use instead?
>> 
>> For starters, you can run busybox.
>
> That's interesting.  I hadn't heard of it before.  I guess the point of 
> it is to make a very small system that will work inside little devices. 
> Did they write it from scratch or did they use GNU code?  It definitely 
> has a very GNUish origin because it is GPL'd and Bruce Perens wrote it 
> for the Debian project:
>
> http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6143283999.html
>
> Thanks for the tip.


I wrote to Eric Andersen, Busybox lead developer, and he wrote back (quite 
quickly, in fact) to say that "Busybox was generally written from scratch. 
Some bits of pieces however do borrow from GNU code when it made sense to 
do so."  See his message below.

So even Busybox is part GNU inside.

Mike



Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 17:14:53 -0700
From: Erik Andersen [andersen at codepoet dot org]
To: Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: Busybox - no GNU inside?

On Sun Mar 13, 2005 at 05:41:06PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote:

> Dr. Andersen--
> 
> Sorry to bother you - I've looked all over the 'net for an answer, but 
> haven't found one.  Were any components of Busybox written using GNU code 
> (e.g., from coreultils), or was Busybox written entirely from scratch?

For the most part, Busybox was generally written from scratch.
Some bits of pieces however do borrow from GNU code when it made
sense to do so,

  -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen             http://codepoet-consulting.com/
--This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
I