Kinect Hacked, Adafruit Bounty Won

scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.

Comments

Here come the patent threats...

[Rob Y.]

What'll you bet that Microsoft rushes out a new, less hackable version. There aren't so many of these in the field that it wouldn't be worth their while. Or are they just planning on using patent takedowns to make it illegal to work with the data stream produced by a Kinect box?

Which brings up an interesting (to me, at least) topic. Once you buy a product that legally implements a patent, aren't you implicitly granted a license to use that patent? To me, if you have, for example, a license to have an exchange-based email account, you've got implicit license on all patents governing access to that account (or at least access to features covered by the account license). Otherwise, what value does the account license have? Likewise, having bought a PC with a (paid for) Windows license covering codec patents, etc, why do I not have an implicit patent license to access those codecs (at least on the machine for which I bought the license). Come to think of it, in the case of the 'decode' side of a codec, why doesn't the encoder's patent license enable me to decode the stream with the software of my choosing? In each case, somebody's paid to use these patents. It sure feels like in all these 'creator vs viewer' situations, we're getting double-charged on patent rights, no?