Metasploit Project Sold To Rapid7

ancientribe writes "The wildly popular, open-source Metasploit penetration testing tool project has been sold to Rapid7, a vulnerability management vendor, paving the way for a commercial version of Metasploit to eventually hit the market. HD Moore, creator of Metasploit, was hired by Rapid7 and will continue heading up the project. This is big news for the indie Metasploit Project, which now gets full-time resources. Moore says this will translate into faster turnaround for new features. Just what a commercial Metasploit product will look like is still in the works, but Rapid7 expects to keep the Metasploit penetration testing tool as a separate product with 'high integration' into Rapid7's vulnerability management products."

Comments

Re:How does one buy an open source program?

[Nursie]

Depends on the project.

If the copyright for metasploit belongs solely to one person, or to a small enough group, then they can sell that on to the company, dependant on what they link to and the licenses used there. I.E. QT was available to purchase and nokia bought the company and the IP there.

They could, if they bought all the copyrights from all the right people, start producing closed source versions. They could also employ all the devs involved and take ownership of the trademark. At that point they have effectively bought metasploit.

What they can't do is rescind the previous license. It's something that's been tried once or twice but it's a nonsense. If they gave away the source under BSD or GPL or similar F/OSS license then it's out there and the community will always be able to use that version and develop it further, under the same (or different if the company took the TM) name.

Hopefully things won't get that far and the source will continue to flow, but who knows.

Anyway, no, you're not naive, buying and closing this stuff requires permission from and probably compensation to all contributors and is only logistically possible on projects where there aren't many of them.

Re:Opensource tool

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Snort was never sold to anyone, Snort has always been a part of Sourcefire, the developer just created a commercial product.

Not sure about tripwire...

Nessus went closed source due to a number of other companies stealing it, incorporating it into their products, and then selling it. It is still free for non commercial use, and free registration will allow you to get updated plugins (albeit a few days behind commercial customers)