Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Venema’s line lands like a deadpan trap: it flatters the fantasy of “perfect” software, then snaps it shut with a systems person’s lived reality. “No known bugs” reads like a victory banner in corporate demos and release notes, but he treats it as an alarm bell. The joke pivots on a quiet truth in security and infrastructure: knowledge is not innocence. Bugs aren’t just defects; they’re discoveries. If nothing is “known,” it may mean nobody has been looking, nobody has been listening, or nobody has been willing to admit what they found.

The second clause, “therefore it has not been updated,” turns a seemingly positive statement into a diagnosis of neglect. Updating isn’t merely feature-chasing; it’s how software keeps pace with new attack surfaces, new dependencies, new assumptions that silently expire. In security culture, a stagnant system doesn’t stay the same - it gets worse relative to the world around it. The internet changes, threat models evolve, compilers shift, libraries deprecate. “No known bugs” can be the signature of abandonware, not excellence.

Subtextually, Venema is also skewering the incentives that reward calm dashboards over ongoing maintenance. Organizations love software that doesn’t make noise, because noise costs money and reputation. But silence can be manufactured: stop updating, stop auditing, stop logging, stop publishing advisories. His intent is to reframe “bug-free” as a suspicious metric, and to argue that healthy software ecosystems are noisy, patched, and slightly embarrassed - because they’re alive.