To be honest, I haven't really tracked it— the product I work on dropped stereo vision in favour of RGBD, so I don't really know where it's landed. I suppose it's not a great sign that the current generation SDK still requires a login to access:
And at least one spinnaker-based driver seems to have inherited the "download the SDK from elsewhere" approach, though who knows if that's due to genuine need or just cargo-culting forward what was implemented years ago in the flycapture driver:
The "proper" approach here would of course be for Open Robotics (the ROS maintainers) to pull the debs and host them on the official ROS repos, as they do for a number of other dependencies [1], but that clearly hasn't happened [2].
I think a lot of hardware vendors who cut their teeth in the totally locked down world of industrial controls/perception still think they're protecting some fantastic trade secret or whatever by behaving like this.
