G'day,

I don't want to start a flame war but I feel this might trigger it, but it comes from a place of genuine confusion and concern for the non-Windows, open source astronomy automation world.

To be clear, I have only been in the hobby a few months but have had 25 years in Silicon Valley global product marketing and management experience, so not entirely a total tech noob (I just act like one).

As a long term UNIX fanboi and Mac OS X and open source lover (I still remerging compiling my first gcc compiler on a Sun 3/60 workstation back when workstations were still a thing) I was surprised to learn that ASCOM existed and was so Windows centric and was delighted to learn about INDI and all the great work that's been done by the community.

Now I learn that despite all this, ASCOM isn't dead, people are still working to get a more open, cross platform ASCOM "bridge" (yuck) and worst of all that INDI seems to have formed a splinter group called INDIGO that seems to have some great ideas to technically improve on INDI but unless I misunderstood has diverted resources away from INDI and adding yet another reason for the ASCOM world to continue to do its thing.

This reminds me so much of the UNIX wars (BSD, System V, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, Irix, etc) that I worry we're going to go the same path - should I just give up now and go with Windows and ASCOM where it's a junk operating system, but at least the people running the standards seem to be a little more, i guess disciplined is the word?

Again, not hating on anyone - the fact that so much time and love has been devoted freely is incredible - I'm just trying to understand where to invest my time, energy and frankly money to ensure I can enjoy my hobby while having a bit of fun tinkering.

This has the potential yet to start another flame-war as is often the case in the Open Source world, so I'm going to close it.

But I'll say this first: This is how Open Source works. Anyone can fork any open source project at any time or start an alternative solution. Some make it and they become the new default, others might die and fade out, and sometimes you end up with two or more strong solutions at the same time (many examples of this in the open source world). Notwithstanding that, INDI is a fully OSI-compatible open source project and would continue to be. IIRC, one big motivation for INDIGO is to move away from LGPL open source license to a non-OSI compatible open source license. So again which one you opt for for your tinkering is up to you!