Wietse Venema Quotes

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

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

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

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

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.

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

I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even that would not stop users from shooting themselves into the foot.

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

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.

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

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.

Windows favors multi-threading, which means that a service is implemented by one single process.