Wireshark is open source and distributed under the GNU (GNU's not Unix) General Public License (GPL). The success is attributed to the many contributing developers over the years.

Developers have added dissectors, functionality, and ease of use. As a result, Wireshark has become one of the most predominant network protocol analyzers in use today.

Many authors have contributed to the success of Wireshark with ongoing development and maintenance of the application. Many will jump in to add their expertise, and some contribute when they need a specific protocol dissector. 

Anyone can be involved, as there is plenty of documentation on how to add a basic dissector. If you do modify Wireshark to add a dissector or visual enhancement, share your enhancement with the Wireshark team.

To see a current list of Wireshark authors, go to Help and About Wireshark and select the Authors tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

Next, let's take a look at packet analysis, the process of gathering traffic on the network, decoding and dissecting the raw bits, and presenting it in a human-readable format for analysis.