I love the idea, and I love strong visions, but why not something closer to Motif/CDE? In my mind at least, when I think of 90s workstations, I don't think of Windows 95.
WindowMaker tried to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI and succeeded admirably.
AfterStep might've started out trying to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI, but it went all kinds of crazy with colors and gradients. Since then its connection to NeXTSTEP has almost entirely been in name only.
The whole UI was a lot more complex, and IMHO, probably the best-looking GUI ever designed. There's an effort to bring it back to life via GNUStep, and as a desktop environment, NEXTSpace:
And someone related to the SCO Group can probably patent-troll you if you use it. There are no giants like RedHat and Novel to protect SerenityOS in such an event the way they protect Linux.
So has Linux, yet SCO didn't hesitate to spend enormous amount of lawyer-hours attacking it.
AFAIK even simple scroll bars and double clicks are patented, the patent holders (Microsoft and Apple, IIRC) just have generously allowed the GNU/Linux community to use them.
What? Even scrollbars? Shows just how broken, regressive and anti-innovation the US Patent system is.
Its part of software legend how Jobs et al learned of these concepts through early exposure to Smalltalk. There are numerous videos of Jobs himself talking about it (with requisite amounts of awe). I'm sure most people here already know the history.
Theres even the interesting tale of how Jobs critiqued the scrolling (he prefered something smoother than line-by-line scrolling), and Dan Ingalls live coded a solution in a few minutes.
"Prior art" indeed :)