Hi Everyone, In the coming months you will likely start hearing about a "Brakeman Pro" product. This is a new project I am heading up and, as the name suggests, it is a commercial version of Brakeman.
There is always some concern when Open Source projects spin off into a commercial products. I want to assure you that I am a strong believer in Open Source - I know Brakeman could not have been successful any other way. I will continue to improve and support the Open Source Brakeman (OSB) project just as I have for the last 4.5 years. If anything, it will get more attention. Changes (and bug fixes) prompted by the Pro version have already been making their way back to OSB. Brakeman is not owned nor controlled by a corporate entity. Technically the copyright is held by myself, my current/past employers, and everyone who has ever contributed source code to the project. Nothing will change about this. OSB will not become simply the "free" or "lite" version of the Brakeman Pro product. In my mind they are very different. OSB is simple, fast, and produces high quality results while avoiding false positives as much as possible. It is built for developers and security professionals to quickly assess the security of Rails application. It should also be easy to add into your software development life cycle - especially as part of continuous integration. On the other hand, Brakeman Pro is intended to provide deeper, broader analysis - which ends up being *much* slower and provides a lot more information to sift through. Since this is at odds with the goals of OSB, I believe there is a clear separation between the two projects and it would be difficult to provide all of the features I want to see in a single project. We are also working hard to build a streamlined interface for investigating and validating the findings and additional information that is being surfaced. If you are interested in Brakeman Pro, please feel free to visit https://brakemanpro.com and drop in your email. We will be inviting testers to our closed beta soon. If you aren't interested - no worries! Everything will continue as normal. This will be the only email I send to this list regarding Brakeman Pro. You are welcome to follow @BrakemanPro on Twitter for updates or email me directly. TL;DR - Nothing is changing with the Brakeman you know and love. Thanks, Justin