[CrankyPants]

WebKit? ALAC?

On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives.

No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best.

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

[fetbaffe]

Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. ALAC was closed source until 2011.

Microsoft has released open formats as well, like XPS. And Microsoft does open source today as well. That's how the industry works today.

Sure flash is bad thing but if Sun had its way with the internet and Microsoft had not stopped them we be all doing Java applets by now.

However that's all beside the point, the point is that complaining against Microsofts closed culture and in the same sentence referencing Steve Jobs is like taking a bath in koolaid, regardless of Microsofts closed culture.

It's just double standards.

[microtonal]

Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it.

Apple created Webkit. They were using/forked KHTML for that, but it quickly diverged.

[fetbaffe]

Sorry for the error, but yes they forked something already open source.

[ddebernardy]

And moreover, they could have closed-source the parts that they eventually released under BSD.

[lake99]

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/

Also related: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx#project... and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/

[CrankyPants]

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.