Rapid 7 Acquires Metasploit

HD Moore sent out an email this morning that Metasploit has been acquired by Rapid7. He is going to join their team full time as their CSO. There are also some other project members that will be joining him at Rapid7 to work on the project full time.

HD has promised that the project will remain Open Source, and he feels that this move is the best move for the project in terms of freeing up his time and the time of others to make project improvements.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. I believe that we will see many new improvements to the framework as a result of this acquisition. At the same time, with Rapid7 now maintaining the rights to  Metasploit all the promises that have been made to HD are meaningless as they can do as they wish with the project. I would predict that initially project control will still be under the supervision of HD and in time his views of where the project should go will be overruled by the powers that be within Rapid7. Rapid7 is just like any other business, they are out to make money, and in the end this will drive the decisions that are made with regard to the project; not the security community.

There is talk about it everywhere and I am interested in seeing your comments.

You can read HD's email here.
You can read Rapid7's announcement here.