@Neko
What I want to know is...
... how much will they pay me to do it?
All well and good doing it for the Good of the Community, but a kitty's got to eat.
I can't answer for H&P, but most likely the answer is "payment will be royalty based only". In other words, you do the work in your own time and you take the risk that low sales may fail to compensate you sufficiently for the man-hours you put into it. That was certainly the kind of deal H&P proposed the last time they asked for programmers (they were going to port a log analysing tool to OS4, did anyone hear anything more about that?), and it seems to be their company policy these days.
All I'd say to anyone planning to take this on is: make sure you have a solicitor vet any contract H&P send you before you sign it. You don't want it to contain the usual ambiguities their contracts tend to have, or you may end up regretting it.
Personally, while I think that adding a good IDE to gcc and gdb is pretty crucial in encouraging new developers, I'd prefer to see an open source effort. Depending on a company whose commitment is questionable and whose attitude is highly questionable is not a wise course of action.