Speaking at LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds has called Linux "bloated" and "huge"...

"Torvalds said that Linux has gotten a bit porky despite having been developed as an alternative to bloated Windows ware," writes The Inquirer's Nick Farrell. "He said that while the open source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft. Heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds."

"It is interesting to see how open source is vulnerable to the same problems associated with bloat in the same way that commercial projects are," writes ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. "What I think is interesting is how as Linux has become bloated, both Microsoft and Apple have been working hard at optimizing code and tidying up their code. Bottom line though, unless code bloat is at the point where end users are affected by it, then it's not really a big deal. Bloat from the perspective of the user and bloat from a developer's point of view are two very different things."

"Has Linux failed? No. Of course not," writes CNET's Matt Asay. "It has simply grown as its adoption has expanded. This is the problem with success: you get pulled into an ever-widening array of tasks."

More here from Computerworld ... and more here from InformationWeek.