Apart from the "universal donor" vs. "universal receiver" argument explained in a sibling comment, Mr. Landley was apparently also involved (as a plaintiff) in the busybox lawsuits. He has explained in various talks etc. that, in his opinion, those lawsuits accomplished nothing except to drive away corporate users that had just started to dip their toes into the water with open source.
So one motivation for creating toybox was apparently that he wanted it as a busybox alternative for users afraid of lawsuits.
Perhaps we don't want those kinds of companies that ignore software licenses? Do the companies think that if they shipped unlicensed Windows with their phones that Microsoft would be "this is fine"
Bottom line is if you're shipping software with your phone that you didn't write, maybe spend the really minimal amount of time to make sure you're in compliance with the license, especially when the license (GPL) makes no onerous demands at all except you might need to put up an apache server somewhere with the source on it.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I think you should follow the licenses of whatever software you're shipping, whether that software is closed-source proprietary software or open source, or something else.
Unfortunately many companies seem to think that because they downloaded the software for free from the internet, they don't need to care about what the license text says. And if they disregard what some random person on the internet whines about them not following some license, a lawsuit seems perfectly in order.
Now one could argue, as Landley seems to be doing, that a permissive license is more attractive to corporations as there is less risk that some mistake somewhere along the way gets them sued. Then one can of course counter that argument by asking whether such users are beneficial to open source in the longer term, or is the open source community just a bunch of suckers doing free work for corporations without getting anything in return.
So one motivation for creating toybox was apparently that he wanted it as a busybox alternative for users afraid of lawsuits.