
Apple
has open sourced ALAC. "The Apple Lossless Audio Codec is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license."
Member since:
2009-11-03
The Apache License is compatible with the GPL. If you have a GPL application you can include Apache licensed code.
However, if you have an Apache licensed application and include GPL licensed code, you must distribute the derivative work under the GPL.
So really this is the best possible solution, as Apache licensed code can become GPL, or stay Apache licensed, depending on what kind of project you include it in.