7-Zip Gui is a free stand alone graphical user interface for 7-Zip, which is a free software/open source file archiver designed originally for Microsoft Windows. In the form of p7zip, the command-line version of 7-Zip has been ported to Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and AmigaOS. It can be made compatible with DOS by using the HX-DOS extender to run the Windows command-line version. 7-Zip operates primarily with the 7z archive format, as well as being able to read and write to several other archive formats. In operation a user can use the command line, graphical user interface or Windows shell integration. 7-Zip began in 2000 and is actively developed by Igor Pavlov. It is related to a cross-platform port, p7zip.
In contrast to the market-leading programs WinZip and WinRAR, which remain as proprietary competitors, 7-Zip is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (with the unRAR license restrictions), and as such is free software (excluding the non-free RAR code). 7-Zip was the winner of the SourceForge.net 2007 community choice awards for "Technical Design" and for "Best Project".
