Adafruit, which laid a $3,000 bounty for the first open source driver for the Kinect, has declared a winner. "Hector" delivered the goods, verified as workable by a third party in the hacking community.
He's putting the $3,000 toward "hacking tools and devices for a group of people he works with closely," on projects such as the iPhone, Wii, and others. "They don't have much expendable income to buy tools and devices to hack, and sometimes this hobby can be a bit expensive, this will be a good investment that will allow them to hack more and newer devices."
Writes Hector: "Here's my take on the Kinect driver. Supports depth and RGB images and displays them on an OpenGL window. It's very hacky right now but it does prove the concept :)"
Adafruit also said it's using the bounty claim occasion to donate another $2,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They defend our digital rights, our right to hack, reverse engineer and do things like this project," Adafruit wrote.
You may recall Microsoft vowed to ""work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant." Adafruit made the EFF donation to recognize its advocacy for tinkerers, programmers and, yes, hackers to perform such reverse engineering.
WE HAVE A WINNER – Open Kinect driver(s) released – Winner will use $3k for more hacking – PLUS an additional $2k goes to the EFF! [Adafruit, thanks Ryan C]