MS vexed by Kinect crack

DIY hardware company Adafruit Industries recently offered a $3 000 bounty to encourage the development of open source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect motion control camera, says ARS Technica.

Developer Hector Martin claimed the prize this week and has published his source code under the terms of the GPL in a public got repository. Martin's implementation includes code for initialising the camera, capturing live video, and processing depth. He has also created a simple OpenGL visualisation to demonstrate that the driver works properly.

Microsoft is not amused by the open source software community's effort to build its own Kinect drivers. The company says it doesn't condone reverse engineering and has vowed to use technical and legal measures to prevent unauthorised third parties from repurposing the Kinect camera.

Google has slapped some Mountain View Chocolate Factory lipstick onto the Freebase Gridworks software the company scooped up when it bought MetaWeb Technologies in July, writes The Register.

The result is a project Google has dubbed Refine 2.0 that builds on MetaWeb's open source tech to clean up unwieldy data sets.

“Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions,” says Google.

The Public Knowledge think tank has issued a white paper warning that the open source community faces new intellectual property challenges with the growth of 3D printing, states V3.co.uk.

3D printing uses technology based around thermal inkjet printers to build 3D objects, laying down a strip of molecules at a time. It is likely to be vital to future motherboard manufacturing, and could have much wider uses.

"The ability to print objects on demand has the potential to be just as disruptive as the ability to summon digital information from anywhere in the world," the white paper said.