Apple’s not known for being particularly open — well, not since the Apple II days when Steve Wozniak had an active say in matters, anyway. It opened up one thing today, however, taking its lossless ALAC codec open source.
TUAW notes that ALAC is now open source under the Apache license, available through MacOSForge. ALAC faces competition from FLAC, but has one inherent advantage; it’s supported on iOS devices where FLAC isn’t. [MacOSForge via TUAW]
Image: Vectorportal
Kent
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 4:41 PMDoes anyone here think Jobs would have allowed this?
BenDTU
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 4:43 PMSince they previously open-sourced WebKit I’d say yes.
David
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 5:20 PMWebKit is a derivative of KHTML, which is LGPL (and hence WebKit had to be).
Clint
Monday, October 31, 2011 at 7:12 AMThats alright as Apple Lossless is a derivative of the FLAC codec…. Nice of them to (re)open source it
SHG
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 4:52 PMDidn’t Jobs announce this a while back, and they’ve only just gotten around to releasing it?
Richard
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 9:09 PMYes. I’m sure it was planned a while ago. I can’t imagine they decided to do this in the past fortnight.
Timmahh
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 4:50 PMWhaaa? There has to be catch somewhere, Apple give nothing for nothing, nothing I say!
Liam Johnson
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 5:59 PMI’d say it’s because Apple is realising the potential in the developer community, and is using this to test the waters — a sort of careful approach to user-development, if you will.
Marten
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 6:04 PMGood to see all your opinions.
Keep them up there worth every penny I paid.
Adam
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 7:09 PMIt’s because ALAC has absolutely no credibility with people who know what they’re talking about. Good move by Apple.
5432
Saturday, October 29, 2011 at 7:47 AM“With people who know what they’re talking about.”
Who?
noone
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 8:00 PMembrace, extend, extinguish, now where have I heard that before?
Max
Saturday, October 29, 2011 at 12:00 AMYeah… that term doesn’t really have anything to do with this.