Christoph Lameter (christoph@lameter.com) created the Debian iptables 
package on March 26, 2000.

Source archive change:
  
  bunzip2 -dc iptables-1.2.6a.tar.bz2 | \
      gzip -9 > iptables_1.2.4.orig.tar.gz

The sources for this package were downloaded from:

  http://www.netfilter.org/files/iptables-1.2.6.tar.bz2.sig
  http://www.netfilter.org/files/iptables-1.2.6.tar.bz2
  http://www.netfilter.org/files/changes-iptables-1.2.6a.txt
  http://www.netfilter.org/files/changes-iptables-1.2.?.html
  http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//packet-filtering-HOWTO.sgml
  http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//NAT-HOWTO.sgml
  http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//netfilter-hacking-HOWTO.sgml
  http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//netfilter-extensions-HOWTO.sgml

The copyright of iptables is the GPL (see /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL).

iptables grew out of the netfilter software whose ancestor in turn was the
ipchains software. A large number of people contributed to the software over
the years.

The core team developing iptables consisted of:

  Jozsef Kadlecsik, Harald Welte, James Morris, Marc Boucher, Rusty Russell

A additional list of contributors is at:

  http://www.netfilter.org/