Originally Posted by pludi

I think you're mixing up "stripped" and "static". "stripped" means that unnecessary symbols are removed, as well as debugging information (as Corona said). But a stripped binary (program or library) can still have dependencies in other libraries (eg. a stripped OpenSSL library cannot be used in debugging, but it will still have at least libc as a dependency).
"Static" on the other hand means that all dependencies are packed into one large program. They take up more space, but have the advantage of working even if the usual libs are not available (eg if you're recovering from a system problem)