gzip is a software application used for file compression. gzip is short for GNU zip; the program is a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, intended for use by the GNU Project.
gzip was created by Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler. Version 0.1 was first publicly released on October 31, 1992. Version 1.0 followed in February 1993.
OpenBSD's version of gzip is actually the compress program, to which support for the gzip format was added in OpenBSD 3.4 - the 'g' here stands for gratis.
