Nothing stops them from supporting FLAC as well except their nasty attitude in general. FLAC is actually used by many services which sell music, unlike ALAC.
AAC is nowhere patent free.
I think in most of these cases the real reasons are more mundane - spending the resources on supporting extra formats would give them no competitive advantage (and a significant cost in terms of maintenance and security). It sucks, but that's the capitalist system for you.
Nobody's complaining Apple doesn't support actual MPEG ALS, for example.
Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format). FLAC is not patented. Q.E.D. Apple don't supported it just in order to be nasty to everyone.
Oh please, stop with this FUD. JPEG2000 is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard, both of which Mozilla is happy to ship. It was designed to be usable without having to licence any patents. Any known patents have been waived. The possibility of unknown patents remains but is vanishingly small by this point (other organisations much larger than Mozilla have been shipping JPEG2000 code for years).
http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/index.html
>Furthermore, it includes guidelines and examples, a bibliography of technical references, and a list of companies from whom patent statements have been received by ISO. JPEG 2000 was developed with the intention that Part 1 could be implemented without the payment of licence fees or royalties, and identified patent holders have waived their rights toward this end. However, the JPEG committee cannot make a formal guarantee, and it remains the responsibility of the implementer to ensure that no patents are infringed.
What the fuck does Mozilla even mean by "free format" these days? It's an ISO standard, it was designed to be usable without paying any fees, there is a waiver of any known patents, it's been used across the industry for years without legal problems. I can't think of a single way that it could be made "more free". The only possible reason I can see is that it wasn't invented by Mozilla/Xiph. And really that is just pathetic and very much a "nasty attitude".
Supporting FLAC requires investing engineer resources in doing this, and possibly legal resources as well. It's only something that Apple would do if there's any benefit to them doing it. And there doesn't really seem to be any benefit toward it. None of Apple's hardware supports FLAC natively, so adding support to SO X would actually be rather counterproductive as anyone using it would have to transcode it to some other format to get power-efficient decoding support on mobile devices anyway. And Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade. Pretty much the only benefit to supporting FLAC natively would be to make things very slightly easier for the 0.0001% of their customers that acquire music in the FLAC format.
FLAC is patent free and actively used (commercially including) by many parties big and small, so this legal FUD is totally unconvincing. ALAC isn't supported in hardware any better than FLAC, so that argument completely misses the point.
> Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade
And for over than a decade "couldn't find resources" to support FLAC which is actually used unlike ALAC. Poor, poor Apple.
Are you really this uninformed, or do you just like to make things up when the facts don't go your way?
ALAC was created for the purpose of streaming audio between Apple devices. I believe it was first used to stream audio to an AirPort Express (which has audio output, so you can plug a speaker into it and stream music from iTunes to that speaker). I assume it's still used for that purpose, but it's also used for the more general category of streaming audio over AirPlay. Given that, I would wager that ALAC is used many orders of magnitude more than FLAC is, even if it's not directly exposed to the end user.
