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Robin Cornelius wrote: > > If a project is > misconceieved or mismanaged it can be come bloated and run out of > control. There are numerious pros and cons here for both sides of the > argument I don't think it need be mismanaged. For a lot of commercial software it makes sense not to spend time optimising the software when the hardware is that cheap. Developer time is incredibly expensive. I suspect you need a very competitive market in proprietary software before performance concerns come to the for, unless performance concerns are crucial to making the software does what it does (play chess, or forecast the weather). Or other motivating factors (pride?). Probably a fair number of people in the GLUG have the skills (or aptitude to learn said skills, I'm sure Robin does) to take the bloat out of a whole host of common free software products, but for the few seconds it will save them each day personally it probably isn't worth it for them. For proprietary software, it may make a difference in the face of competition, but in the case of monopoly suppliers you'll get bloat until it becomes so painful that the supplier finds using or supporting their own software too painful as a result. I could spend three or four days weeding 30 or 40 MB out of the memory footprint of Thunderbird (probably need a few days extra to familiarise myself with build tools and such like), or I could buy an extra 256MB of RAM for a minuscule fee. Bloat is down to simple economics. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html