I prefer free, and open codecs so they'll never go away, because no company can take the secrets with them. That said, ALAC has been reverse engineered well enough to encode and decode them with non-Apple software.
Still I keep all my file in .wav format on my hard drive (again, disk space is cheap), and then transcode to what ever I need for the player I'm using.
ALAC, FLAC, Monkey, WMA Pro, they all only get about 50% compression at best. Sure that means you can store twice as many songs, but it isn't like the 90% compression of MP3s where you'd get an order of magnitude more songs in the same amount of space. You can fit over 2000 CDs in .wav files on a terabyte drive. That should be enough for anyone.
