Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of dependencies, useless features and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and security vulnerabilities, as well as loss of freedom, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at it worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md), commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualification to do.
Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), useless features and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and [security](security.md) vulnerabilities, as well as **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)**, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at it worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md), commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualification to do.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, minimal, safe, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations.
One of a very frequent questions you may hear a noob ask is **"How can bloat limit software freedom if such software has a [free](free_software.md) license?"** Bloat de-facto limits some of the four essential freedoms (to use, study, modify and share) required for a software to be free. A free license grants these freedoms legally, but if some of those freedoms are subsequently limited by other circumstances, the software becomes effectively less free. It is important to realize that **complexity itself goes against freedom** because a more complex system will inevitably reduce the number of people being able to execute freedoms such as modifying the software (the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a trivial program is much greater than the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a highly complex million [LOC](loc.md) program). As the number of people being able to execute the basic freedom drops, we're approaching the scenario in which the software is de-facto controlled by a small number of people who can (e.g. due to the cost) effectively study, modify and maintain the program -- and a program that is controlled by a small group of people (e.g. a corporation) is by definition [proprietary](proprietary.md). If there is a web browser that has a free license but you, a lone programmer, can't afford to study it, modify it significantly and maintain it, and your friends aren't able to do that either, when the only one who can practically do this is the developer of the browser himself and perhaps a few other rich corporations that can pay dozens of full time programmers, then such browser cannot be considered free as it won't be shaped to benefit you, the user, but rather the developer, a corporation.
## Example of Bloat
- [Web](web.md) since the onset of "web 2.0" has been steadily becoming more and more bloated with things such as Adobe Flash and [JavaScript](javascript.md). By today the situation about web bloat is reaching almost unbearable levels, especially in modern sites such as [YouTube](youtube.md). For a great read see [The Website Obesity Crisis](https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm).
Miloslav Ciz
3 years ago