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Free software on different platforms

J5's post about how Gnome is about the people and their ideas made me again think about the same thing I've been pondering lately.

Free software is being used on new platforms: handheld tablets and other embedded systems etc.. Many times this requires a rewrite of at least the user interface parts, because a desktop is very different from a touchscreen/stylus use case for example.

My worry is, how do we make sure that ported applications, like the Rythmbox for the 770 will not end up as a orphan fork of the parent project? It's not a simple problem - if an application has a clean separation of the "core" and "ui" this could be possible by having a separate UI version in the source tree and the same tarball could be used to build them all. FBReader is one example of this.

Many of the nice, polished applications we develop for our desktop today would also make sense in an embedded car computer or a handheld, or a linux-based phone. But the resource limits are more restrictive, and the user interface needs to be approached from a different angle. Yet, it would be sad if the "core" would end up being forked, and the project would not stay in touch with the "parent". Synergy is what makes things better, and I would hate to see more "orphans".