Re: Background info on sophie?

To add to what Alain had to say, Sophie is not officially supported by
Sophos, but I am a Sophos employee. Since anyone using Sophie is by
definition a Sophos customer, we will always try to keep Sophie going.

Please note also that the SAVI API is called by a pretty wide range of
software products, including Sophos's own. OEM partners like Mirapoint,
Ironport and Blue Coat all depend on it. Other technology partners like
Clearswift, SurfControl and MailMarshal all support it. We have a huge
vested interest in keeping the API stable, in spite of the fact that the
underlying technology is by its very nature quite changeable. We like to
think we've done that fairly well over the past 4 or 5 years.

As an aside, at some point in the not-too-distant future Sophos is
considering releasing a fully supported product that will perform the
same functionality as Sophie. Would there be interest among existing
Sophie users in this kind of a product, and would any of you be willing
to beta test if this goes ahead?

Regards
Rich

Alain Fauconnet wrote:
> 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_
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