Wietse Venema
Wietse Venema
Wietse Zweitze Venemais 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...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionScientist
lines mail today
As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.
writing interesting challenges
Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.
mean favors window
Windows favors multi-threading, which means that a service is implemented by one single process.
challenges pieces updates
The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.
stupid simple software
The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.
people use want
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.
running window process
Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service.
bugs machines intrusion
One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.
bugs software known
My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.
requirements software
Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements.
effort maintenance software
Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.
competition users
Sure, but competition is good for the user.
technology doe software
Defect-free software does not exist.
writing safe difficult
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.