When Microsoft's hot new Kinect motion-sensitive controller was released earlier this month, Phil Torrone and Limor Fried saw an opportunity to subvert what was being presented as a closed system.
Torrone and Fried, the principals behind the open-source hardware firm Adafruit Industries, love almost any kind of culture hacking, and in the Kinect, they recognized a system that presented users far more utility than Microsoft was offering.

Not wasting the chance to raise a bit of a stir, Adafruit said it would pony up $1,000 to the first person who could come up with an open-source driver for the Kinect. And when Microsoft responded to the bounty by telling CNET it did not "condone the modification of its products" and that it would "work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant," Adafruit was not deterred. Instead, it upped the bounty, first to $2,000, and then again, to $3,000.

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