1.6.  Development and maintenance of Ethereal

Ethereal was initially developed by Gerald Combs. Ongoing development and maintenance of Ethereal 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 authors page on the Ethereal web site.

Ethereal is an open source software project, and is released under the GNU General Public Licence (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:

The Ethereal source code and binary kits for some platforms are all available on the download page of the Ethereal website: http://www.ethereal.com/download.html.