$2,000 Bounty For Open Source Xbox Kinect Drivers

ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload driver code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released yesterday. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox." The bounty was originally $1,000, but Microsoft's dour response induced Adafruit to double it. ("With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.") In addition, the Xbox 360 dashboard update that preceded Kinect's launch contains upgraded anti-piracy restrictions.

Comments

Corrections

[SuperKendall]

Apple is the only company that has locked those down in the first place. Microsoft just added a walled garden app store; historically it was pretty wide open.

Yes and "historically" Apple has computers you can open and work on easier than PC's. Nothing really matters "historically", what matters is what they are doing NOW. And in that way Microsoft is just as closed as Apple.

And comparing the AppleTV to an Xbox is a superficial comparison.

It would have been had I compared an AppleTV to an XBox. Instead I was lumping it in with other IOS devices as things Apple doesn't really do much to stop jailbreaking on.

Apple also doesn't doesn't support blue ray(sic) because Steve wants to push his online distribution model.

Apple doesn't support blu-ray in part because of the licensing, although I'm sure the aspect of selling videos through other channels comes into play as well.

Similarly, they disallow flash on their devices without valid reason.

Well actually the reason is a dramatic drop in battery life. And Apple doesn't "disallow" Flash on anything except for iOS devices - they've just stopped including it by default in some computers. Which to bring the whole thing full circle, is exactly what Microsoft does with Flash...