Public Project of common interest - It is an excellent idea . Lots of us are doing same thing / same type project with in different manner. Some body is excellent is some area but weak in other.
In a public project best of everything will come out with uch less efforts.
In this way we can develop a huge base of common intellectual property like a standard 8051 math library , code base , schematics for standard things like watchdog, power supply ,interface