1.5.
Development and maintenance of Wireshark
Wireshark was initially developed by Gerald Combs. Ongoing development
and maintenance of Wireshark is handled by the Wireshark team, a loose
group of individuals who fix bugs and provide new functionality.
There have also been a large number of people who have contributed
protocol dissectors to Wireshark, and it is expected that this will
continue. You can find a list of the people who have contributed
code to Wireshark by checking the about dialog box of Wireshark, or at
the authors page on the
Wireshark web site.
Wireshark is an open source software project, and is released under
the GNU General Public License (GPL).
All source code is freely available under the GPL. You are welcome to
modify Wireshark to suit your own needs, and it would be appreciated
if you contribute your improvements back to the Wireshark team.
You gain three benefits by contributing your improvements back to the
community:
-
Other people who find your contributions useful will appreciate
them, and you will know that you have helped people in the
same way that the developers of Wireshark have helped people.
-
The developers of Wireshark might improve your changes even more,
as there's always room for improvement. Or they may implement some
advanced things on top of your code, which can be useful for yourself
too.
-
The maintainers and developers of Wireshark will maintain your
code as well, fixing it when API changes or other changes are
made, and generally keeping it in tune with what is happening
with Wireshark. So if Wireshark is updated (which is done often),
you can get a new Wireshark version from the website and your changes
will already be included without any effort for you.
The Wireshark source code and binary kits for some platforms are all
available on the download page of the Wireshark website:
https://www.wireshark.org/download.html.
