One of the biggest gripes I have with opensource/freeware software distributions is that not a lot of them seem to give much thought to producing compact software (i.e. small memory footprint and compact code - as in compiled code, not lines of code). I'm ashamed to admit that one of my own contributions also fall under this criteria given its dependency to wxPython. I'm guessing that it's mostly because we're lazy and want to just get something that works out the door quickly. Recently, I was looking for a light-weight RSS reader, because Sharpreader keeps crashing, hogging memory, among other things. I searched for "light-weight RSS reader" and found one called "Feed Reader" that said the following:

One of the main goals of Feedreader architecture is to keep its footprint small. Say goodbye to bloat: installation file is under 3.5MB.

Wow, small footprint was one of the goals, and the binary still comes out to 3.5MB (since they said under, I suppose it's possible that it's only 1KB)? I don't mean to pick on this application, cuz for all I know it's a great application and every single byte is necessary. It just gave me a chuckle to find a bold statement on its front page saying that a 3.5MB file was lightweight. ^^;