Thanks to AlexP of the NUI Group wrote a driver that grants full control of the motion-sensing device in Microsoft’s Kinect.   

Now Hector Martin of Marconsoft has created an open source driver for the Kinect and made it available to the public for free.  The rumor has it that AlexP planned to sell his driver.

According to the readme file, “the Kinect Camera driver,” says the README file. “Does RGB and Depth. Main.c implements a simple OpenGL driver. Hopefully it should be mostly self-explanatory… You pretty much just open the USB device, call cams_init(dev, depthimg, rgbimg), and your depthimg and rgbimg callbacks get called as libusb processes events.”

The drivers were developed in an effort to claim the $2000 award for developing open source drivers for the Microsoft Kinect. Since AlexP did not make his drivers public, the reward will probably go to Harold.

To further expand this trend that pays for open source drivers, Endgadget reported that the NUI group plans to release SDK and Windows drivers after they collect $10,000 in donations for their work.

What do you think of this trend?