Wietse Venema Quotes
26 Wietse Venema quotes:
"Defect-free software does not exist."
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"When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause."
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"As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included."
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"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."
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"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."
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"For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Internally, Postfix does use multi-threading, for example, for its scheduler program that hands the mail queue requests to the mail delivery agents."
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"Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance."
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"Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements."
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"Like most people, I am not smart enough that I can design software without having to restructure the software every now and then."
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"Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists."
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"My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated."
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"One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion."
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"Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service."
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"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."
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"Sure, but competition is good for the user."
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"The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems."
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