This is the Debian GNU/Linux prepackaged version of GNU tar. GNU tar, heavily based on John Gilmore's public domain version of tar, was originally written by Graham Todd. It is now maintained by Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>. This package is maintained for Debian by Janos Lenart <ocsi@debian.org>, and was built from the sources found at: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar/ More recently, I'm directly using the upstream source repository at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git GNU tar is Copyright (C) 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License version 3 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3. The Debian packaging is Copyright (C) 2006, 2007 Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License version 2 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.