[Flac-dev] Git branch with compiling fixes for win32

[Declan Kelly]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 05:41:21AM -0800, avuton at gmail.com wrote:

> Hate to be Capt. obvious here, but there's a lot of development going
> on here that should be encouraged. If the FLAC project isn't going to
> open up, it would make a lot of sense for someone to take over
> maintenance on a github account with the git-cvsimport or such. I
> don't see anyone stepping up, me included, but I wanted to throw this
> out there in case someone hasn't really thought about it yet.

Looking at the FLAC website, the most recent news is almost 2 years old,
and there's no evidence to show that the project's still live. I haven't
seen any post from Josh Coalson on this list in a while: is he still
running the project?

Something else to think about:
Apple recently released sources for Apple Lossless reference utilities.
It's all under an Apache license.

This will (presumably) lead to more software developers spending more
time improving ALAC support in their projects, with more reference
material available than the unofficial reverse-engineered code (as used
in vlc and libavcodec).

This will leave Apple with even less reasons to support FLAC in their
own products. Anyone with an iPad/iPhone/iPod must install Rockbox to
play FLAC files, and the Apple TV can only play FLAC (and anything that
was not bought from iTunes) using XBMC, after being jailbroken.

But for the Average End User, they don't want to have to jump through a
bunch of hoops to get FLAC support. Apple Lossless will Just Work on all
Apple devices (as it always did), but now it's more freely available so
the freedom-loving hippies can stop complaining about the source code.

-- 
-Dec.
---
"Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world." - Marc Andreessen, 1994