>much of the world is using older hardware with relatively smaller amounts of memory and storage. If you read Linus' email, you'll see that for most libraries

>much of the world is using older hardware with relatively smaller amounts of memory and storage. If you read Linus' email, you'll see that for most libraries it doesn't save any memory or disk space. What it WOULD do to link statically is save the extra IO needed to load shared libraries (somewhat, the same code would be loaded at program execution instead of dynamically).