Frankenkamera: an open source digital camera is being developed in Stanford · Заметки

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/levoy-opensource-camera-090109.html

По русски (кратко): http://www.nixp.ru/news/9910

P.S. There's another company founded by a Russian which specializes on Open Source digicams (security cameras):

Elphel, Inc. was started in 2001 to provide high performance cameras based on free software and hardware designs. Freedom of the users of Elphel products is our top priority - we value and protect it with the GNU General Public License that covers all the Elphel software and hardware designs.
This freedom extends from the convenience of the out-of-the-box usage of the cameras with the intuitive GUI to the possibility to modify any parts of them. It protects user right to create and distribute derivative products based on our designs, products that may be suitable for the applications we had never thought about ourselves.