Wietse Venema Quotes

"Defect-free software does not exist."

"When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause."

"As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included."

"At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years."

"Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it when my systems were under attack by someone who appeared to walk through walls."

"For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way."

"I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise."

"I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on."

"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems."

"Internally, Postfix does use multi-threading, for example, for its scheduler program that hands the mail queue requests to the mail delivery agents."

"Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance."

"Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements."

"Like most people, I am not smart enough that I can design software without having to restructure the software every now and then."

"Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists."

"My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated."

"One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion."

"Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service."

"Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software."

"Sure, but competition is good for the user."

"The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems."