zlib

Abhishek Jain asks Stack Overflow about the differences between zlib, gzip and Zip, and gets a fascinating and very insightful response from none other than Mark Adler. I particularly like the comment Adler made when the OP asked about referenecs for his answer.

I am the reference, having been part of all of that. This post could be cited in Wikipedia as an original source.

This, to me, is a perfect example of the enormous impact of open source and free software libraries developed in the 80s and 90s have on modern-day computing. All these small components of Linux or *BSD systems that were developed over the years now play such crucial parts in so many complex systems we rely on every day.

Free/open source software developers are the heroes of the internet era, and as such should have monuments built to their glory and schools named after them.