The foundation will help to facilitate Wireshark’s development, and promote analysis and troubleshooting education, according to its founders.
This week Sysdig, Wireshark’s current corporate sponsor, announced that the popular open source Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer will now be supported by its own foundation.
Wireshark’s website defines a Network Protocol Analyzer as “a combination of programming and hardware and in certain cases, a separate hardware device that can be installed in a network or computer in order to improve its security level against viruses and other types of malicious activities”. Wireshark has been fulfilling this function since way back in 1998.
The Wireshark Foundation is a non-profit organization “helping as many people as possible understand their networks as much as possible”, according to Wireshark. By hosting educational conferences, “the Wireshark Foundation provides industry professionals and students with the knowledge and understanding required to ensure that the networks and systems we depend on are reliable, secure, and fast”, they say.
Promoting and managing SharkFest
The launching of the foundation was announced in a post on the official Wireshark blog. “The foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and will host SharkFest, our developer and user conference, help to facilitate Wireshark’s development, and promote analysis and troubleshooting education”, according to the post.
SharkFest is a series of annual educational conferences staged in various parts of the globe and focused on sharing knowledge, experience and best practices among the Wireshark developer and user communities. It is an annual event that started in 2008.
Goals focused on education
The official website for the Wireshark Foundation details the organisation’s main goals. The primary objective, according to the site, is “to educate current and future generations of network engineers, network architects, students, application engineers, network consultants, and other IT professionals in best practices for troubleshooting, securing, analyzing, and maintaining productive, efficient networking infrastructures through use of the Wireshark free open source analyzer and other analysis tools”.
Another goal is to share use cases and knowledge among members of the Wireshark and other open source project developer and user communities, “in a relaxed, informal milieu”, according to the Foundation.
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