 It has since disappeared from many distributions, both because it infringed the LZW patent and because gzip produced better compression ratios using the LZ77-based DEFLATE algorithm, but as of 2008 at least FreeBSD includes both compress and uncompress as a part of the distribution.Several other popular compression utilities also used LZW or closely related methods.LZW became very widely used when it became part of the GIF image format in 1987.