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Busybox
Available from http://www.busybox.net/.
Originally written by Bruce Perens to form part of early Debian bootdisks.
Nowadays mostly maintained by Erik Andersen. Has a very active mailing list and small and large contributions from dozens of people.
One binary whose behaviour is determined by the name by which it is invoked.
Call it as ls, it lists files.
Call it as tar, it manages archives.
One binary is installed and lots of links made.
Extensive customisation of build process is easy. Uses 2.4 kernel build system (make menuconfig). Only build in the functionality you required.
Savings are made by not duplicating support functionality. This is all in the statically linked libbb and failing to use a function in there when appropriate is a Bad Thing!