Flagged as incorrect. VentureBeat apparently can't tell the difference between Kinect's code and API examples. This needs to be deleted or the title changed to "Microsoft Releases Open Source Kinect Interfacing Sample Code"

Since when does releasing code samples count as open-sourcing a codebase? You cant even look at the samples without downloading Visual Studio.

Are you sure? I can see the samples under "Source Code".

http://kinectforwindows.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset...

And as mentioned in the blog post, it's significant that you don't have to download Visual Studio to look at the samples.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy-acces...

These are simply code samples to use the Kinect SDK, not any code to interact with the hardware, right?

Based on the blog post linked in the article [1], yes: these are code samples.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy-acces...

And yes, they allow you to interact with the hardware, through the API.

I think the parent to my comment was asking whether this code allowed low-level hardware access, not API-mediated access. IIRC, the Linux Kinect driver (libfreenect [1]) provides that kind of access.

[1] https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect

"aka “Not GitHub.” Baby steps, baby steps!"

Whatever was actually released, how about people realise that Github isn't the be all and end all of open source code distribution.

Wow, when you copy and paste from venturebeat.com a link to the content is automatically appended to the copied content.

In case you were curious about how they do it: http://i.po.st/static/script/post-copypaste.js