tar is good enough for many uses, so people did not move on. And it doesn't help that tar.gz / tar.bz2 compresses way better than zip in most cases (thanks to

tar is good enough for many uses, so people did not move on. And it doesn't help that tar.gz / tar.bz2 compresses way better than zip in most cases (thanks to using a single compression context, rather than a new one for each file; and also compressing the filenames in the same context), and that it carries ownership and permission information with it - whereas zip doesn't. The HVSC project, who try to collect every single piece of music ever created on a Commodore C64, distribute their archive as a zip-within-a-zip. The common music file is 1k-4k, goes down to ~500-1000 bytes zipped; The subdirectory+filename are often 100 bytes with a lot of redundancy that zip doesn't use, so they re-zip. Had they used .tar.gz or .tar.bz2, the second stage would not be needed.