HD moore, who is a world class hacker and the lead developer of metasploit, announced this news today, metasploit has been acquired by Rapid 7. HD moore said in his email to the framework mailing list:

"Rapid7 was the right company for Metasploit for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they understand the value of the community have seen the benefits that funding a project like Metasploit can provide since our first conversation. Second, the management team at Rapid7 is made up of some brilliant folks. They may not be exploit developers, but they understand business and how to make a marriage with Metasploit increase their own bottom line without destroying the value of project in the process. Third, Rapid7 has an amazing technical staff and a solid vulnerability management product. There are only a few companies in the world that understand how much work is involved in doing vulnerability assessments right, and this team has been doing it for over 9 years. Lastly, Rapid7 has an enormous QA lab, with the ability to perform regression testing across a massive array of operating systems and patch levels. The combination of their staff and technical resources will allow the Metasploit Framework to make a huge leap ahead in the comingmonths."

While this is definitely great news for the metasploit project and HD's team, with the resources available inside Rapid 7, I am sure metasploit will go into a new stage. My personal hope is the project won't become another commercial project and continue to be the best open source vulnerability platform.