Frans van Dorsselaer

Frans van Dorsselaer is an independent developer whose open-source utilities focus on bridging gaps between physical hardware and virtual environments. His flagship project, usbipd-win, turns any Windows workstation into a lightweight USB server, exposing locally attached printers, licensing dongles, serial adapters, or specialty lab instruments to WSL2 instances, Hyper-V guests, or remote desktops as if they were plugged in directly. Typical use cases include sharing a single hardware key among multiple developers, redirecting a flash-programmer to a Linux build container, or letting a legacy scanner appear inside an isolated VM without extra cables or hubs. The tool operates through the standard USB/IP protocol, so client-side support is already built into most modern Linux distributions and requires no proprietary agents. Administrators appreciate the command-line interface that can script device attach/detach operations and enforce per-device ACLs, while GUI users rely on the system-tray overlay for quick, visual reassignment. Updates are published directly to GitHub with detailed changelogs, ensuring transparency and rapid adoption of kernel-level fixes. Because the codebase is MIT-licensed, enterprises can audit, fork, or embed it inside larger automation frameworks without legal friction. Frans van Dorsselaer’s usbipd-win is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installing the latest release and supporting batch deployment alongside other utilities.