Quote from: satoshi on July 16, 2010, 03:09:59 PM
Because of all the dependencies that different systems don’t have. It’s easier to just static link what we can. It doesn’t increase the size by very much.
I think size (static binary is 8x as big in my case) is not the problem, but security.
Boost, openssl and Berkeley DB are fairly common on unix systems (many things depend on them) and also Wxwidgets (the only argument is that bitcoin uses the current development branch and not the stable branch). Second, static linking doesn’t mean you can always run it (in my case it tries to load libpng-1.2, which is not present on my system, libpng-1.4 is, and the static fails to load). Third, openssl hasn’t been free of security issues, by statically compiling people keep using the insecure version even if their system provides an updated safe version.