This is an interesting sourceforge project - what appears to be modernized versions of classic unix utils, without trying to change their original algo's etc. Basically stuff that worked from V7 research unix through OpenSolaris:
Heirloom Project:
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/While I'm smitten with BusyBox, the only other option was full gnu utils for the most part. This appears to offer classic expectations from those original utils, modified to work in modern environments.
I'm not saying it is any better than the current gnu utils, but interesting nevertheless.