Re: Background info on sophie?

OK, I'll take the dive and reply, although I'm probably not by far the
right person to provide informed replies. I just happen to know Vanja
well and I've been using Sophie for quite a few years, although I have
not contributed more than a couple of trivial patches for FreeBSD.

> 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.

To my knowledge, all of them are true in some way:

a) Sophie is indeed very stable, only minor problems have been found
and patches have been contributed in a very reasonable amount of time.
I've been using it for over 3 years and I haven't had any major problem
with it.

b) don't know really, but it's certainly not a mainstream program

c) the original developer of Sophie, Vanja Hrustic, has stopped working on it
some time in 2004. Since then, Scott Walker and Richard Baldry have kind of taken over in
maintenance mode, integrating contributed patches and putting together
a new 3.05 version in Nov 2005, as well as giving the program a new
home page: http://www.clanfield.info/sophie/
There hasn't been any new release
since then, despite some relatively minor bugs found and patches sent to the
mailing list. I don't think that any new development is being done,
and all of us cross fingers hoping that a change in Sophos' API won't
break it.

> 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)?

Under these conditions (within a day) I don't think I'd take any chances.

> Is there any involvement of Sophos with the development of sophie, apart 
> from providing docs for the API?

Don't know... probably only Scott Walker could say...

That's not much precise information I know. I just didn't want to
leave the question completely hanging.

Greets,
_Alain_