Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

There is a quiet flex in Venema's phrasing: software you "install and forget" is the opposite of the modern attention economy, where apps constantly demand updates, logins, subscriptions, and your psychic bandwidth. Coming from a scientist and security engineer best known for infrastructure tools like Postfix and TCP Wrappers, the line reads as a mission statement for the unseen layer of the internet. The best systems software does not perform for an audience; it disappears into the background and keeps performing.

The intent is almost ascetic. "I like to keep it that way" isn't modesty so much as a design ethic: stability over novelty, boring over flashy, predictable over "innovative". In security, this is more than taste. Attention is often a symptom of failure. If your mail server or security wrapper is on your mind, something has already gone wrong: spam floods, outages, breaches. "Forget" becomes a proxy for trust.

The subtext also pushes back on a culture that treats software as a relationship. Venema rejects the idea that users should continually renegotiate terms with their tools. No constant nudges, no churn for churn's sake, no product roadmap masquerading as progress. His ideal user experience is the lack of an experience.

Context matters: the open-source world prizes maintainers who ship reliable code and then resist the temptation to over-engineer. Venema's line captures the rare confidence of someone who measures success by absence: fewer tickets, fewer surprises, fewer reasons for anyone to think about him at all.