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The Tcpdump Group

The Tcpdump Group develops tcpdump, a command-line packet analyzer, and libpcap, a portable C/C++ library for network traffic capture. Both are open source under a 3-clause BSD licence.

Licensing at a Glance

  • Open source

  1. tcpdump and libpcap are under a 3-clause BSD license.[1]

  2. The maintainers state they have no objection to moving to a 2-clause BSD licence, but the number of contributors who would need to agree makes the change impracticable.[2]

  3. The tcpdump licence permits redistribution in source and binary form provided the copyright notice and disclaimer are retained and the authors' names are not used to endorse derived products.[3]

  4. The software is provided as is, without any express or implied warranties.[4]

  5. The site lists tcpdump 4.99.7 (2026-09-21) as the stable release and libpcap 1.11.0 (2026-09-13) as a testing release.[5]

Products

References

  1. Home | TCPDUMP & LIBPCAP · tcpdump.org · retrieved 2026-09-27
  2. Home | TCPDUMP & LIBPCAP · tcpdump.org · retrieved 2026-09-27
  3. tcpdump/LICENSE at master · the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump · github.com · retrieved 2026-09-27
  4. tcpdump/LICENSE at master · the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump · github.com · retrieved 2026-09-27
  5. Home | TCPDUMP & LIBPCAP · tcpdump.org · retrieved 2026-09-27
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