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Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of [software](software.md) and technology means overcomplication, unnecessary complexity and/or extreme growth in terms of source code size, overall complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), [redundancy](redundancy.md), unnecessary and/or useless features (e.g. [feature creep](feature_creep.md)) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with [bugs](bug.md) (e.g. [security](security.md) vulnerabilities or crashes), as well as great obscurity, ugliness, **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)** and waste of human effort. Simply put bloat is burdening [bullshit](bullshit.md). Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at its worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md) causing commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, [minimal](minimalism.md), 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.
Some have attempted to measure bloat, e.g. the famous *web bloat score* (https://www.webbloatscore.com/) measures bloat of websites as its total size divided by the page screenshot size (e.g. [YouTube](youtube.md) at 18.5 vs suckless.org at 0.386). It has been observed that **software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster**, which is now known as [Wirth's law](wirths_law.md); this follows from [Moore's law](moores_law.md) (speed of hardware doubles every 24 months) being weaker than [Gate's](bill_gates.law) law (speed of software halves every 18 months); or in other words: the stupidity of soydevs outpaces the brilliancy of geniuses.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, [minimal](minimalism.md), 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](corporation.md).
The issue of bloat may of course appear outside of the strict boundaries of computer technology, nowadays we may already observe e.g. **[science bloat](science_bloat.md)** -- science is becoming so overcomplicated (many times on purpose, e.g. by means of [bullshit](bullshit.md) science) that 99% people can NOT understand it, they have to BELIEVE "scientific authorities", which does not at all differ from the dangerous blind religious behavior. Any time a new paper comes out, chances are that not even SCIENTISTS from the same field but with a different specialization will understand it in depth and have to simply trust its results. This combined with self-interest obsessed society gives rise to [soyence](soyence.md) and large scale brainwashing and spread of "science approved" propaganda.
Back to technology though, 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](de_facto.md) 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](freedom.md)** 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). This is not any made up reason, it is actually happening and many from the free software community try to address the issue, see e.g. [HyperbolaBSD](hyperbolabsd.md) policies on accepting packages which rejects a lot of popular "legally free" software on grounds of being bloat ([systemd](systemd.md), dbus, zstd, protobuf, [mono](mono.md), https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:incompatible_packages). 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.
Some have attempted to measure bloat, e.g. the famous *web bloat score* (https://www.webbloatscore.com/) measures bloat of websites as its total size divided by the page screenshot size (e.g. [YouTube](youtube.md) at 18.5 vs suckless.org at 0.386). It has been observed that **software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster**, which is now known as [Wirth's law](wirths_law.md); this follows from [Moore's law](moores_law.md) (speed of hardware doubles every 24 months) being weaker than [Gate's](bill_gates.law) law (speed of software halves every 18 months); or in other words: the stupidity of soydevs outpaces the brilliancy of geniuses.
Despite this there isn't any completely objective measure that would say "this software has exactly X % of bloat", bloat is something judged based on what we need/want, what tradeoffs we prefer etc. The answer to "how much bloat" there is depends on the answer to **"what really is bloat?"**. To answer this question most accurately we can't limit ourselves to simplifications such as [lines of code](loc.md) or number of package dependencies -- though these are very good estimates for most practical purposes, a more accurate insight is obtained by carefully asking what *burdens* and *difficulties* of ANY kind come with given technology, and also whether and how much of a necessary evil they are. Realize for example that if your software doesn't technically require package X to run or be compiled, package X may be [de facto](de_facto.md) required for your software to exist and work (e.g. a pure multiplayer game client won't have the server as a dependency, but it will be useless without a server, so de facto all bloat present in the server is now in a wider sense also the client's burden). So if you've found a program that's short and uses no libraries, you still have to check whether the language it is written in isn't bloated itself, whether the program relies on running on a complex platform that cannot be implemented without bloat, whether some highly complex piece of hardware (e.g. [GPU](gpu.md) or 8GB of [RAM](ram.md)) is required, whether it relies on some complex Internet service etc. You can probably best judge the amount of bloat most objectively by asking the following: if our current technology instantly disappeared, how hard would it be to make this piece of technology work again? This will inevitably lead you to investigating how hard it would be to implement all the dependencies etc.
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) (or "[FOSS](foss.md)") [license](license.md)?"** Bloat [de-facto](de_facto.md) 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](freedom.md)** 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). This is not any made up reason, it is actually happening and many from the free software community try to address the issue, see e.g. [HyperbolaBSD](hyperbolabsd.md) policies on accepting packages which rejects a lot of popular "legally free" software on grounds of being bloat ([systemd](systemd.md), dbus, zstd, protobuf, [mono](mono.md), https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:incompatible_packages). 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.
**How much bloat can we tolerate?** We are basically trying to get the most for the least price. The following diagram attempts to give an answer: