[Toybox] A thought about toybox and IOT

[Tim Bird]

There were some interesting presentations at the recent ELC about systems
running with very low memory.  Particularly interesting were the talk about
micro-Yocto by Tom Zanussi and the talk about Linux on microControllers by
Vitaly Wool.  Talk slides are online at:
http://elinux.org/ELC_2014_Presentations

One use case that seems to keep coming up, but not mentioned nearly as
directly as it should be, is single-process systems.  It occurs to me that
toybox is uniquely positioned to be a great base for single-process proprietary
systems, because of it's license.  Basically the proprietary piece can be
statically linked with a few needed toybox tools, into a single binary, with
the problems that one would encounter with the GPL and busybox.
This gets you the tools reuse you need, along with static linking, which will
help with overall system size, as well as allowing for proprietary solutions.

I'm not saying this should affect development plans for toybox, but it might
be worth promoting this aspect of toybox, to increase adoption (potentially
both users and developers).

 -- Tim Bird
Senior Software Engineer, Sony Mobile

P.S.  Yes - I'm still lurking about. :-)