When Rapid7 bought the Metasploit Project exactly one year ago this week, there were rumblings of concern that the open-source penetration testing tool would lose its identity and go all commercial.
Metasploit indeed has gone commercial -- there are new commercial versions of the tool available now from Rapid7 in addition to the open-source framework -- but most penetration testers say the tool has maintained its open-source roots and is evolving much more rapidly with the added development resources.

Rapid7 rocked the penetration testing marketplace with its announcement it had purchased the Metasploit Project and hired its creator, HD Moore, as chief security officer of the company. Moore and Rapid7 executives were adamant about avoiding a failed open source-commercial marriage such as that of the Nessus scanning tool, which went from an open-source to a proprietary, closed-source license under Tenable Network Security. Their goal was to instead both improve and preserve the open-source framework, while making a commercial version of Metasploit as well.

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