[shmerl]

> Then there's the ongoing maintenance burden, of dealing with upstream changes, local bugfixes, and just plain integration with the rest of the QuickTime stack.

Yes, and Apple perfectly did all that when it came to their own ALAC, as you already mentioned. Not FLAC though. NIH I guess. Or just "screw your customer". Such serious company like Apple being unable to support FLAC with QA and upstream updates? I don't believe that. They just don't want to. And not because it's costly (it's nothing for them), and not because they are scared of legal threats (there are none - it's used in tons of places just fine). It's just Apple being Apple the way I see it.