Wietse Venema Quotes

Netherlands, Programmer
1951

Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit.

Also known as Physicist

Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance.

Wietse Venema
However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

Wietse Venema

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

Wietse Venema
- Machine
- Bug
- Intrusion
Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service.

Wietse Venema
- Running
- Service
- Process
My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

Wietse Venema
- Bugs
- Reply
- Updated
Sure, but competition is good for the user.

Wietse Venema
- Good
- Competition
- User
Defect-free software does not exist.

Wietse Venema
- Exist
- Software
- Defect
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.

Wietse Venema
- People
- System
- Software

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

Wietse Venema
- Business
- Effort
- Exists
Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

Wietse Venema