"Considering it's been announced the DCS will continue as it's own company, and that Lionel is pushing LCS, the thought had crossed my mind.
Why not work with the JMRI community and make DCS JMRI compatible? Or vice versa, depending on how you want to look at it. JMRI is already capable of layout control and much more. (JMRI stands for Java Model Railroad interface and is cross platform compatible on Windoze, Mac, and Linux)
While fairly well known ion the other scales, both MTH and Lionel's tendency to keep their coding "secret" to a certain extent has prevented it making in roads into DCS and Legacy / TMCC. Yet many DCC system manufacturers have given JMRI the info to interface with their hardware.
If you haven't heard of it, here's their info from the JMRI site:
The JMRI project is building tools for model railroad computer control. We want it to be usable to as many people as possible, so we're building it in Java to run anywhere, and we're trying to make it independent of specific hardware systems.
JMRI is intended as a jumping-off point for hobbyists who want to control their layouts with a computer without having to create an entire system from scratch.
You can manage your locomotive rosters and easily program your decoders using DecoderPro®. You can build control panels and control your layout using PanelPro™ to set up signaling. OperationsPro™ lets you create manifests that route cars across your railroad from shipper to receiver, and provide train crews with operating instructions.
Going beyond the basics, you can use Logix to automate your layout's behavior, interface with X10 and Insteon systems to control your layout room's lights and write scripts to extend the capabilities of the system."
