Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Venema’s line reads like a calm engineering truism, but it carries a pointed warning to anyone who treats software as a finished monument. By opening with “Like all software,” he refuses the comforting myth of exceptionalism: no codebase gets to opt out of time. Not even the “stable,” “secure,” or famously opinionated ones. The verb choice matters: software doesn’t merely improve or evolve; it “survive[s].” That’s an ecological framing, and it’s brutal. In this worldview, requirements are the environment, and the environment changes whether maintainers feel like it or not.

The specific target is Qmail, an email server long associated with a philosophy of minimalism and rigor. Its reputation for security and simplicity made it beloved, but those virtues can harden into a kind of institutional pride: if you’ve built something “right,” why chase the latest expectations? Venema’s subtext: because the definition of “right” is external. New attack surfaces appear, protocols shift, operational realities mutate, and users’ tolerance for friction collapses. Requirements aren’t whims; they’re the accumulated pressures of scale, adversaries, and interoperability.

Coming from a security-minded scientist, the sentence also smuggles in a critique of purity culture in tech. Elegance that can’t accommodate new constraints becomes fragility wearing a tuxedo. Venema isn’t romantic about software; he’s insisting on a discipline that’s less flattering and more honest: maintenance isn’t a downgrade from invention, it’s the price of continued relevance.