The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux",[10] as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands.

It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2,[6] after controversially deciding not to move to version 3.

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 (LRP).

Cinege made several additions, created a modularized build environment, and shifted BusyBox's focus into general high-level embedded systems.

During this time the Linux embedded marketplace exploded in growth, and BusyBox matured greatly, expanding both its user base and functionality.

[15] Since October 2006, Denys Vlasenko has taken over maintainership of BusyBox from Rob Landley, who has started Toybox, also as a result of the license controversies.

The lawsuit,[17] case 07-CV-8205, was filed on September 20, 2007, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of Andersen and Landley against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., after BusyBox code was discovered in a firmware upgrade and attempts to contact the company had apparently failed.

The case was settled with release of the Monsoon version of the source and payment of an undisclosed amount of money to Andersen and Landley.

[34] No other developers, including original author Bruce Perens and maintainer Dave Cinege, were represented in these actions or party to the settlements.

BusyBox benefits from the single binary approach, as it reduces the overhead introduced by the executable file format (typically ELF), and it allows code to be shared between multiple applications without requiring a library.

[45] On January 11, 2012, Tim Bird, a Sony employee, suggested creating an alternative to BusyBox which would not be under the GNU General Public License.