Today, I’m excited to announce that Gerald Combs, the original creator and lead maintainer of Wireshark, has joined Sysdig. In addition, Sysdig is becoming the primary sponsor of Wireshark.
As founder and CTO of Sysdig, I am involved in announcements and press releases on a daily basis. This one, however, has a special meaning for me. Gerald and I have been friends for a long time, starting when Wireshark was called Ethereal. At that time, a capture library that I developed while I was a university student in Italy, WinPcap, was used to port Ethereal to Windows. That was my first contribution to the project. A few years later, in 2006, after I moved to the United States, Gerald joined my first company, CACE Technologies. Together, we renamed Ethereal as Wireshark and created a business around it.
After CACE was successfully acquired, Gerald continued devoting his life to the mission of growing Wireshark and leading its incredible community. On my side, I shifted my attention to security, containers, and the cloud. I started Sysdig, working with a talented team on the creation of another open source tool, Falco. Since the beginning, my work at Sysdig has been heavily inspired by the “packet capture stack” that Gerald and I helped define: Wireshark, tcpdump, libpcap, BPF. One of the reasons why Sysdig’s instrumentation is universally considered the most accurate, rich, and scalable is that we built it on top of the ideas behind that stack, adapting them to the modern world of cloud and containers. Countless times, during Sysdig’s early days, we were inspired by Gerald’s work.
And now Gerald has joined us! This is, on one hand, a great pleasure, like a reunion of old friends. On the other hand, it opens up a universe of possibilities. Wireshark is an incredibly important tool. Its UI is part of the muscle memory of every software professional. Its feature set has saved our butts countless times. At the same time, the world is changing quickly. Software today runs in the cloud, orchestrated by Kubernetes. With the help of Gerald, Sysdig wants to invest in making Wireshark even more useful in modern cloud environments. We’ll work on expanding its feature set and make sure it remains the cornerstone of troubleshooting and security investigation, even when software is containerized and runs in the cloud.
We will do this with the highest respect for the community of developers, contributors, and users who are the true soul of Wireshark. Sysdig is committed to providing continuity to the project and to contributing to its ecosystem, starting with supporting the Sharkfest conference.
For the moment, Gerald, I want to welcome you to Sysdig. I look forward to revolutionizing another industry with you. :-)
To meet Gerald, take a look at his blog post for the Wireshark community.