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KDE started the Webkit stuff. I don't quite get why Apple made ALAC (2004) when FLAC (2001) was already there.

> Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Sure, it had its roots in KDE's KHTML and KJS, but WebKit was started as an internal Apple project, and without their efforts it's highly unlikely that KHTML/KJS would have ever developed into the dominant layout engine.

According to the guy who implemented FFmpeg's ALAC encoder, there are power benefits to ALAC over FLAC. ALAC was developed when iPods were struggling to get 8 hours of playback, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that Apple's engineers wanted to be able to match the codec to the hardware as efficiently as possible.

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