Funny you should mention this. The astronomy community actually suffers from "proprietary bloat" in terms of astronomy software and mount firmware. I used to ow

Funny you should mention this. The astronomy community actually suffers from "proprietary bloat" in terms of astronomy software and mount firmware. I used to own a certain red-colored high-end mount from a well-known astronomy software and mount vendor. This mount had a completely closed-source control protocol, and had to be used with buggy software that was only available for Windows and MacOS at the time (a big problem since I used FreeBSD and Linux), so I went to the liberty of installing a filter driver above their USB drivers on a Windows box to reverse engineer the protocol and develop an INDIlib (an open telescope control standard) driver to bypass the need of their bloated software suite. When I posted about my project, I received a rather nasty cease-and-desist letter from them threatening legal action if I discussed it any further despite the fact that I was well within the bounds of the exceptions allotted by the DMCA. Being a young lad of 16 at the time, I had no resources to fight back against them and as such never got the driver into INDI mainline.