Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design 215
kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'"
NPR Sci Fri (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds exactly like what was said on NPR Science Friday yesterday -- probably a regurgitation of that program. What the article doesn't point out: M$ is locking down the interesting parts at tightly as possible --- that is, you can drink from the 30 fps firehose of data coming out the USB, but there's no access to the interesting libraries to turn that into information. Can't blame 'em M$ has about three years work (no idea how large the team is) in those libs.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, maybe they didn't leave it open specifically because they wanted people to write an open source driver, but if they had been serious about keeping it closed, they would have almost certainly given it a better attempt.
Re:Their side of story (Score:1, Interesting)
What they mean by "hacking" is actually "cracking" but they carefully choose the word "hacking" to proselytize.
The underlying propaganda = "hacking = software and ideas Microsoft doesn't sell"
HTH
Re:Everyone has a right to change their mind (Score:4, Interesting)
If Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction is the wrong one, well, that's to be expected. They're assholes by nature. But, if after sleeping on it (and consulting with their lawyers and engineers and finding out there's nothing they can do that won't eat up every cent of profit they might have made on the thing) they come up with the right decision, I'm willing to forget their previous stance. Keep it up long enough, and they might even earn some goodwill.
I do agree that this is certainly better than them being complete idiots and trying to fight this til the end of time. However, if they didn't want to come off as asshats I think they should have said, "originally we had said that the Kinect should remain closed. However, we see that a group of talented enthusiasts has taken our hardware and done some truly innovative stuff with it. We now see that value in this, and wish to commend them on their hard work. In fact, we're so stoked about this that we've decided to donate a Kinect to 100 high school robotics teams across the country." Now THAT would look good on Microsoft.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
The comments in this thread are ridiculous. Of course they meant to. This isn't some random project by 4 college dropouts. This is one of the most successful companies to ever exist. If something is open, they meant for it to be open. It isn't like they used some weak type of encryption. It's entirely open.
The need every sale they can get... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
See, Microsoft can learn! Unfortunately it requires at least one complete failure doing the exact opposite of what they should have done in the first place.
My hunch is that they looked at the financial side, and assuming they don't take a loss on the hardware as a loss leader for software sales, realized they had nothing to lose selling the device outright.
Re:MS has mixed up 'Hacking' and 'Cracking' (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's cracking. Hacking seems to be exactly what has taken place...
Whatever. The point is that the expensive part of Kinect is what's inside the XBox and much more difficult to get to.
A little over a year ago Microsoft announced to developers that all that processing was going to be removed from the Kinect (Natal at the time) and be done on the XBox. It seemed like a stupid idea, and they said it was to cut costs which seemed lame. But when the open source driver came out last week I realized there really are some forward-thinkers at Microsoft. Now they have a peripheral which is relatively cheap to make and was quite cheap to design, and all of the money they spent on R&D is nicely protected inside a box.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a guess- When you provide drivers, you're implicitly supporting the project for non-entertainment purposes. Having 50 engineers a day calling up for support on their pet robotics project is probably not something MS wants to do. If they were really into the idea of supporting this, they'd develop a dev package for it and charge $2000.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes isn't it, but I heard the NPR interview and there were many long pauses before this guy said the things he said. I suspect that he got a long talking to when he got back to the evil empire and that Microsoft's new open stance on this is really just them watching the ass of the horse run away while they stand in the open barn door.
The part that really got me was when Ira asked him if M$ was going to sue anyone for doing this. There was probably 30 seconds of dead air while the guy squirmed in his seat and then he said no.
Re:The more open one? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is not standard about the USB ports on the Xbox? You can even hook up a regular old USB keyboard to it (makes debugging so much easier, by just adding some keyboard listeners to your code and let them fire debug stuff), it's the only device except for my PC that will charge my MP3 player (USB power handshake thing) , and inside the plastic shell lies a regular laptop SATA drive, with a funky connector to connect it to the Xbox (I've broken the thing open because my drive likes to spin down after initial boot, giving me a E68, but a quick disconnect-connect fixes that). That the drive is signed by microsoft with a file on the first couple of sectors is just DRM/anti-piracy/money grabbing, but you can rip it out, format it and use it as a normal drive, nothing abnormal about it.
If you're really so gung-ho for open, I don't see why you would be interested in a PS3, with all the rampant "shove it up your ass" anti-modding updates sony has been going on for the last year or so, or the fact that you'd have to re-encode your MKV's to watch on the damn thing.
The perfect open system is a Windows PC (Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine) with a beefy videocard, a x360 controller, all hooked up to a nice TV. The Games For Windows thing makes it almost into an Xbox (can't tell the difference between Just Cause 2 PC or Xbox, even the tooltips give you the correct icons0, you get better graphics and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. A cheap dualcore system with a 5770 goes for not that much money these days, and can keep up at full HD resolutions with ease. Also gives you access to every codec you will ever need, as well as multitasking, free multiplayer gaming, home entertainment system and whatever you cook up yourself in whatever programming language that you prefer.
PS: Slight hate on the PS3 for all the "fsck linux" attitude, but not intentional as a flame post
On-Topic: I hope they release some sort of (un)official extension for XNA with kinect integration soon, do that and I will buy the thing in a trifle, just to do some hacking with it. I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's :D.