Defect-free software does not exist.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

Sure, but competition is good for the user.

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

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

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

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.

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.

For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.

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.

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

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

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

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

Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance.

The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.

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.

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

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

All software sucks.

Defect-free software does not exist.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters.

Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

As every new breed of virus is conceived, created and released into the wild, another small change is made to the anti-virus software to combat the new threat.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.

None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

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.

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

The scanning of barcodes, or the reading of RFID transponders, generates data that is used in a software package to provide management or control information.

You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works.

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.

I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.