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
design dutch-scientist smart software
Like most people, I am not smart enough that I can design software without having to restructure the software every now and then.
stupid simple software
The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.
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.
technology doe software
Defect-free software does not exist.
agent almost comments dutch-scientist transport
As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.
delivery dutch-scientist hands mail program queue requests
Internally, Postfix does use multi-threading, for example, for its scheduler program that hands the mail queue requests to the mail delivery agents.
people way forget
For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.
matter code functionality
Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.
safety kind physics
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.
six-months want might
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.
years two roots
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.
writing computer surprise
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.