What's preventing the reverse engineering effort? Legality issues? Difficulty? Time? (I've heard stories about samba, and it seems like if MS protocols can be reverse engineered, then things that have to obey the laws of physics couldn't be that much worse).
Given issues like this, and how talented the kernel guys are ... why haven't they written a C compiler? (Not meant to rant; serious question -- we wrote silly C compilers for class; seems like programmers with real talent should be able to write real, industry strength C compilers, especially if it only needs to support C, and not C++/Java/ObjC/...)
EDIT: This is really the type of stuff I'd love to see more on news.ycombinator.com -- tools to make me more efficient.