Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Venema is staking out an ethic of infrastructure: the mail server should be a platform, not a trap. Coming from the author of Postfix, that matters. It is easy for a widely deployed tool to grow a gravitational pull, quietly pressuring admins and vendors into “the Postfix way” until compatibility becomes a polite fiction. His line pushes back on that dynamic with a deliberately unglamorous principle: interoperability.

The specific intent is practical. Mail systems live in messy, heterogenous environments where security tooling changes fast and where policies differ by organization, jurisdiction, and risk tolerance. Anti-virus is the example because it’s the most obvious pressure point: integrate too tightly with one scanner and you’ve effectively deputized a third-party product into your core architecture. The moment licensing changes, a vendor sunsets a feature, or a new threat demands a different approach, your “free choice” becomes a migration crisis.

The subtext is also reputational. Postfix has long been positioned as a safer, more maintainable alternative to legacy MTAs. Lock-in would undercut that narrative by making Postfix feel like a walled garden wearing open-source clothes. Venema is signaling to users that power stays with operators, not with the maintainer and not with adjacent vendors.

Contextually, this is a classic open-source governance move: set a boundary against feature creep that turns a clean core into an integration junk drawer. By saying “with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise,” he’s defending modularity as a security posture and a cultural stance: keep the core stable, keep the edges swappable, keep the ecosystem honest.