The maintainer of GNU ed is also the author of lzip. Though lzip predates xz, this GNU ed release is the first .lz file I've ever seen in the wild. Everyone e

The maintainer of GNU ed is also the author of lzip. Though lzip predates xz, this GNU ed release is the first .lz file I've ever seen in the wild. Everyone else that distributes .tar.gz files (compatibility) along with .tar.something_else files (higher compression) seems to use bzip2 or xz, not lzip.