Hacker wins $3,000 bounty for open source Kinect driver
A $3,000 bounty to create an open source driver for the Kinect has been won by a hacker, despite Microsoft expressing its grumblings about the affair, and a further $2,000 was donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to help defend hackers' rights.
The bounty, which was offered by open source electronics firm Adafruit Industries on the US release date of the Kinect, originally started at $1,000. But it quickly doubled and then tripled as Microsoft found out and responded angrily about modifying its products - even though a software driver is far from modding the hardware itself
The hacker who won the bounty was Hector Martin, who wrote to Adafruit saying: “Here’s my take on the Kinect driver. Supports depth and RGB images and displays them on an OpenGL window. It’s very hacky right now but it does prove the concept.” Martin uploaded his open source driver with documentation to the web, which was one of the requirements for winning the bounty, and Adafruit verified that the hack does indeed work on a Linux machine.
