MSNBC.com’s last acquisition was social media company Newsvine in October 2007. MSNBC has continued to maintain Newsvine as a separate entity—although it has integrated its discussion features throughout MSNBC.com.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether or how MSNBC would now integrate EveryBlock with MSNBC.com. MSNBC says that EveryBlock will continue on as an independent brand—but it’s easy to see how it could add customized EveryBlock updates to its home page, depending on where MSNBC.com visitors are located. In a statement, MSNBC says it is now “positioned to help EveryBlock lead us into local markets nationwide.”

Earlier this year, EveryBlock’s Holovaty said his startup faced a predicament since under the terms of the Knight Foundation grant, the EveryBlock publishing system had to be open sourced so that anybody could create similar sites. “How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?” he asked. Holovaty went on to say that he was “looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out.”

In a post Monday, Holovaty writes that he’s staying with EveryBlock and the deal will have no impact on the platform’s open-source code.