I would say that Joel Spolsky answers this quite well: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000

I would say that Joel Spolsky answers this quite well: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html What would be interesting to see is a fork of OpenSSL with the intention of cleaning up the code, removing abstractions where they are unnecessary and adding them where they are, and adding a comprehensive test suite to ensure correct behaviour wherever possible.