While I love opensource so much for freedom to change anything I want to. Many times, I think opensource community spent too much effort to “rework” something those propietary softwares do have them. Most of these rework were happen for “compatible” dream.
Most clear example of this situation may be the Mono project. While I love this project so much, this project put very much effort on Windows.Form and hope to port many .NET application to Linux.
The drawback of this development path is Mono will never catch up with Microsoft’s API. When Windows.Form get nearly full compatible, Microsoft would be heavily promote their new API such as Avalon and within a year Mono will get far behind.
The way out of this loop may me to build some middle API like wxWindow to unified API for each platform. Developers would be have choice to write a portable code or stick to OS. The new API should be easy to port from major API as from MFC to wxWindow.
With this way, we can split the project to port program from “Windows.Form to Linux” into many projects. Frist project for developing new API. The rest project is to port (or fork) project those platform dependent into platform independent API.