Jesse Booher wrote:
There is a certain allure to clean slate designs and there may very well be no existing open source user interface projects that you would consider worthy of your time, but I wondered if you have considered any slightly less ambitious alternatives such as creating a framework employing components from an existing open source project? It seems to me that the promise of open source development is not served when wheels (or widgets) need to be reinvented over and over again.
What we do at Boost is not open source development in the usual sense. One of our goals is to produce standard library proposals with reference implementations and present them to the committee for consideration. In such a proposal, the single most important thing is the specification, because that's what goes in the standard. Preparing a standard library proposal based on an existing open source implementation isn't necessarily going to be much easier, even if it were a good idea. It's better to get the fundamentals right, because we'll be stuck with them for five+ years, at least.