Background info on sophie?

Hi, all,

for quite some time I've been subscribed to this list and from the 
(amount of) messages on this list I can get the impression that:

a) sophie is running quite stable, there are not many questions and 
problem reports and/or
b) there are very few companies and organizations using sophie and/or
c) there's not much development on sophie

Now, it is possible that a combination of a), b) and c) is true, or that 
none of them is true. I would like to get some feeling on the risks a 
commercial company runs, when starting to use sophie. What if a new 
version of Sophos comes out and it doesn't work with sophie? How many 
people are developing sophie, how large is the installed base. Does a 
company require its own programmer/developer to supports its sophie 
installation (in case there is a problem with Sophos and an official 
patch for sophie is not provided within a day)?

Is there any involvement of Sophos with the development of sophie, apart 
from providing docs for the API?
Please note: my message is not intended to criticise anyone, is just a 
request for some background information on sophie.

/rolf