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.
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.
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.
