Development and maintenance of ethereal – Lucent Technologies Ethereal User Manual
Page 23
1.6.
Development
and
maintenance
of
Ethereal
Ethereal was initially developed by Gerald Combs. Ongoing development and maintenance of Eth-
ereal is handled by the Ethereal 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 Ethereal,
and it is expected that this will continue. You can find a list of the people who have contributed
code to Ethereal by checking the about dialog box of Ethereal, or at the
page on the Ethereal
web site.
Ethereal is an open source software project, and is released under the
(GPL). All source code is freely available under the GPL. You are welcome to modify Ethereal to
suit your own needs, and it would be appreciated if you contribute your improvements back to the
Ethereal 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 Ethereal have helped people.
•
The developers of Ethereal might improve your changes even more, as there's always room for
improvements. Or they may implement some advanced things on top of your code, which can be
useful for yourself too.
•
The maintainers and developers of Ethereal 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
Ethereal. So if Ethereal is updated (which is done often), you can get a new Ethereal version
from the website and your changes will already be included without any effort for you.
The Ethereal source code and binary kits for some platforms are all available on the download page
of the Ethereal website:
Introduction
9