It's been a while since we've talked about the future of Review Board, and we felt it was time. We have some important topics to discuss.
We Need Your Help
We love working on this product. We began developing it in 2006, back before GitHub and Pull Requests existed. Back when code review was done over e-mail, bug trackers, and whiteboards, if it was done at all. It was a painful process, and we knew we had to innovate. Commenting directly on the code, viewing interdiffs, multi-line commenting, filterable dashboards, integration with other tools—all of it was new. Many of those inventions have since become standard across the market.
That's almost 20 years of helping make code review what it is today. But that could change. The instability in the tech sector, the downsizing, the cost-cutting… It's impacted us.
Review Board is open source and will remain so. We've never required a fee to use the software. Continued development is instead funded through support contracts, Power Pack, and sponsored feature development as part of our company, Beanbag, Inc.
We'd like to share some facts you may not know:
- Beanbag is a small company. We are three very dedicated people developing Review Board and our family of products.
- We're self-sufficient, living off the sales we work hard to earn and keep. We're not burning through VC money or operating as a loss leader for a giant tech company.
- Microsoft and GitHub have been doing what they’re good at: dominating the market, putting smaller companies out of business, and making it hard for the rest of us to stand out, stay funded, and innovate.
- Review Board is used in a wide range of industries, at companies of all sizes, for software and hardware development, but…
- Over 98% of our install base uses Review Board completely for free.
To put it simply, the future of Review Board depends on us making sales.
We have a lot planned for this product. We've been working toward some big changes, capabilities no tool on the market is even exploring, and we want to see our vision through.
We're fighting to make that happen.
But we do need your help.
If your company is using Review Board today and finds any value in it at all, we'd like to talk to you directly to find out:
- What you get out of Review Board today.
- What would keep you using Review Board tomorrow.
- If there’s an opportunity to work with your company on a support contract, Power Pack license, or sponsored development. We'll work with you to meet your budgets.
If you're open to discussion, please reach out directly, and we'll schedule time to talk with you or anyone from your company.
What We're Working On
Here's just a taste of what we've been building and setting the groundwork to build:
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) review and diffing.
- Google Docs review and diffing.
- New innovations for improving the code review process, visualizing code, and aiding in very large reviews (we're keeping some of these under wraps for now).
- Deep pull request integration with GitHub and GitLab, letting you combine the best of their services and the best of ours.
- A reworked Dashboard for better filtering and tracking of review status and workloads.
- More organizational control over access policies and custom review request approval flows.
These are just some of our plans.
Are we on the right track? Can you help us get there?
Thanks for your time,
Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge
Creators of Review Board