[boutad]

According to the man page for bsdtar that ships with Ubuntu

A tar command appeared in Seventh Edition Unix, which was released in January, 1979. There have been numerous other implementations, many of which extended the file format. John Gilmore's pdtar public-domain implementation (circa November, 1987) was quite influential, and formed the basis of GNU tar. GNU tar was included as the standard system tar in FreeBSD beginning with FreeBSD 1.0. This is a complete re-implementation based on the libarchive(3) library. It was first released with FreeBSD 5.4 in May, 2005.

[kjs3]

Ah...my bad. OpenBSD tar has Berkeley copyrights. Looks like Free/NetBSD don't. I made a bad assumption there. Thanks.