High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! bzip2 is a free and open source file compressor that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It is developed and maintained by Julian Seward. Seward made the first public release of bzip2, version 0.15, in July 1996. The compressor`s stability and popularity grew over the next several years, and Seward released version 1.0 in late 2000.