So, wanting to access a USB device from python on Windows, I've spent the morning searching the web and it seems that the most popular, comprehensive and up to date (as of late 2014) combo is PyUSB (1.0.0-beta-2) on top of libusb-1.0 (1.0.19). In particular it took me a while to figure out the current status quo regarding all the politicking, forks, re-combinations and domain name changes that the libusb-1.0 project has undergone over the last couple of years.
So, AFAIK the current official/definitive libusb-1.0 project is hosted at
has download tarballs at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb
and maintains a project page at
Given all the ructions, looking at the SourceForge download page I was a bit suspicious to note that while 1.0.19 is the most recent release, 1.0.9 from a couple of years back is still the more popular download. Why?
I'm happy with TessellatingHeckler'e explanation. The zombie web site libusb.org that links to the old 1.0.9 version of the library on SourceForge has the highest Google page rank and is the first thing people find when searching for details on the project