Soliciting Feedback: OS Design

A couple of years back, I saw a project being done out of a university
that was a first attempt at a self-replicating robot. The idea was
that it would use various plastics and metals to create circuits and
other parts. The idea was far to ambitious to succeed today, but it
got me thinking.

A first step toward such a thing, and indeed toward a completely self
replicating factory might be a machine tool that would ship with
complete plans to make all of the parts of itself. Sure, this ruins
the business models of a company that might want to sell them, but
that's not the point, rather the point is, is it feasible?

A complete machine would need lots of electronics and proprietary CAD
software to build, but that can all be bought off-the-shelf, making it
conceivable that once you have a machine, you can make more of them
with it.

Sticking with mechanical stuff (because manufacturing multilayer PWBs
is still difficult), what would such a machine look like? How many of
the parts could be made with milling and lathe operations? Is free
motion control software mature enough? What CAD formats should be
used? How can we reduce the number of different materials required?
Could enough people get interested in it to create a
electro-mechanical equivalent of open-source software?

I'm just interested in your thoughts about what it would take to build
a basic machine assuming you can buy some stuff like motors and screws
and single-board computers.

What about licensing? Would people put up with software that
occasionally insisted on building a spare part?

Imagine 20 or 100 years out, could this base design evolve into
something truly automatic, say garage sized, that had the capability
to create everything necessary to make itself, including
semiconductors. Assuming it could create all kinds of other stuff,
from watches to cars, how would this change the world? Do we really
want to give every tinkerer or psychotic teenager the ability to build
a fighter jet or nuke from scratch?

What should it be called? (I'm partial to simple names like "Factory v0.001")

Sorry if my random Sunday daydreams bore you -- feel free to ignore.