It looks like Hector Martin may be one step closer to the $3,000 bounty offered by Adafruit for open source Kinect drivers. Just today he announced and published full drivers with some caveats and to-do yet:

TODO:
9 – TONS of cleanup. I mean LOTS.
10 – Proper buildsystem (CMake probably)
11 – Determine exactly what the inits do
12 – Bayer to RGB conversion that doesn’t suck
13 – Integrate support for the servo and accelerometer (which have already been
14 reverse engineered)
15
16 BIG TODO: audio. The audio chip (the Marvell) requires firmware and more init
17 and does a TON of stuff including the crypto authentication to prove that it is
18 an original Kinect and not a clone. Who knows what this thing does to the
19 incoming audio. This should be interesting to look at.

The bounty was originally set at $2,000 until Microsoft intimated that what they were trying to do could be illegal. Just to spite the software giant—and pretty much to snub them for being wrong—Adafruit raised the amount to $3,000. Of course, Microsoft meant to imply that actually “modifying” the device would be illegal; but subsequent press quotes from the software giant carefully ignored that making drivers doesn’t modify the device at all. See our previous coverage from last week about when Alex P got drivers working.

When a video finally surfaced of the hack in play, Microsoft came out to say that in fact it didn’t display any “hacking” as the device wasn’t modified. (Someone should tell Microsoft that hacking doesn’t mean precisely what they think it means.) The bounty being offered by Adafruit doesn’t match Microsoft’s strange definition—they’re probably just hot and bothered by Xbox mod-chip court cases.

I’d tell Microsoft to cam down and back off about the Kinect open source drivers, but they should know that they could disrupt the whole drama by releasing drivers themselves. (They do have them.)

Way to go Hector.