jerk

So, time for my humble opinion, ASCOM isn't that great, the tie in with Windows COM is a bit too closely coupled, alpaca on the other hand is http/https based, using the same concepts as ASCOM but without the Windows bias. It can run on Linux/OSX/Windows and clients such as CCDCiel are available as well as sky simulators like sky_simulator to help with development. There is a whole slew of standards involved in http getting and posting various formats such as images and commands. On the other hand INDI is XML based, commands are sent by encoding your requirements over a single non-standard TCP socket which is kept open continuously, with no natural point at which to close or restart that socket. Back in the real world a lot of manufacturers only supply INDI or ASCOM drivers that run only on Windows, and hardware that uses those drivers can have a very long life and needs supporting. The magic solution is for manufacturers to give their devices sufficient intelligence to support alpaca, or else control them from a legacy windows driver solution. The latter stopgap is probably what people are thinking of when they say alpaca is backward looking. When will manufacturers move to alpaca? When customers start to prefer devices that come with such drivers. Meanwhile it would be helpful for the open source community to embrace dual INDI/alpaca support, the way CCDCiel does it. Another difference, INDI works by asking what the driver supports in the form of a list of XML capabilities, this is complex compared to the alpaca approach of simply asking the driver, do you have capability X (which I need)