Yesterday I saw a bit of news that flashed across Twitter that caught my eye immediately. If true, it would have meant that Microsoft was making a really ground-breaking move that would catch a lot of people by surprise.

The Twitter message was from developer Joshua Blake and led to a post where he suggested that Microsoft was going to be open sourcing its Kinect software development kit. (SDK)

On day 3, several Kinect and Microsoft Research (MSR) presented a panel Q&A session. At 26:05 of the Kinect panel video, I introduced myself as the founder of the OpenKinect community and asked whether they had considered embracing the open source Kinect movement started by this community, which has lead to hundreds of Kinect Hacks around the world, by open sourcing their code.

To my surprise, Dr. Kristin Tolle, Director of MSR’s Natural User Interface team, responded that they will be publishing the Kinect SDK as open source! She referenced earlier discussion about embracing and enabling the community to take what Microsoft has created and using it in new ways and mentioned that MSR has a history of releasing open source SDKs.

When I returned to my seat, another MSR researcher approached me and suggested that Kristin may have misunderstood my question or had misspoken; however, I followed up with Kristin afterwards and reconfirmed that she meant open source as in the public can modify and recompile the sources as well as share the modifications. She also emphasized that they want to enable people to share modifications and enhancements.

Well it turns out that Dr. Tolle could very well have misunderstood the question or misspoken, at least according to Mary Jo Foley who reached out to her contacts at Microsoft for clarification:

However, it turns out Microsoft isn’t open-sourcing the Kinect SDK, after all — at least according to what Microsoft officials told me this afternoon. There was no explanation for Tolle’s reported comments. I received this statement from a spokesperson for the Kinect SDK team:

“Kinect for Windows SDK will not be made available as open source.  We are not releasing any source of the SDK, the SDK is in binary. The intent is to allow use of the SDK only to facilitate non-commercial experimentation with the Kinect functionality.”

So it would seem that for now there is not much of a chance of the Kinect SDK being open sourced, but now that the issue has been raised, and along with Microsoft’s past open source efforts, we could possibly see this  happening. I’m not expecting it to, but you never know with Microsoft these days.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]