...except that Apple ALAC is Free Software released under the Apache License. And it's no more similar to FLAC than any other lossless audio codec. It's widel

...except that Apple ALAC is Free Software released under the Apache License. And it's no more similar to FLAC than any other lossless audio codec. It's widely believed that Apple chose to build their codec rather than simply implement FLAC because their goal was to optimise for maximum battery life efficiency on the iPod. (No such optimisations have been open sourced by Apple, but that doesn't in any way imply their non-existence.)