Igor Pavlov

Igor Pavlov is an individual software developer best known as the creator and primary maintainer of 7-Zip, a free and open-source file archiver first released in the late 1990s. Pavlov designed the 7z archive format and the LZMA compression algorithm (and later LZMA2) that underpin 7-Zip’s high compression ratios. The project provides both a graphical File Manager for Windows and several command-line/standalone tools (for example 7z.exe and standalone console builds), and is widely used for creating and extracting many archive formats.

7-Zip is distributed primarily under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for most of its source code, with some components having different licensing considerations; the source is made available on the project website. There are community-maintained ports such as p7zip for Unix-like systems. Igor Pavlov is not a corporate entity but an individual developer whose work on 7-Zip has been adopted broadly in both consumer and enterprise contexts for...