Accordingly, many on the Sun Hamburg Team would nominally move over to the OOFoundation (quite possibly staying in Hamburg) and some would stay at Sun, these to ostensibly work the StarOffice and Solaris builds (but that's Sun's business).

This would both spread the financial pressure to relieve Sun of the entire burden as well as remove the structural impediment of the conflict of interest Sun has in which the requirements of a boxed product drive the resources of an Open Source and Free Software project. I don't think it's presumptuous of me to say that it would be a relief to Sun without penalizing them or preventing them from moving forward with even more efficacy on StarOffice.

The trick is to get industry participation (financial & other resources) from the interested parties to fund The OOFoundation. This would naturally include all parties interested in the success of OpenDocument, Linux and/or increased competition for Microsoft. I am not aware of a swelling interest here, but it is the sine qua non of an OOF. This ignores also the need for something similar for OpenDocument -- the more important phenomenon by several lengths.

I believe a large missing piece for OOo thus far is the utter and complete absence of universities. An OOF would be the right kind of body to interest them to claim a stake in OpenOffice; and additionally we need to seed a grass roots effort that would grow a software distribution network among students at universities and high schools -- a "Software Underground" -- because the university comp sci departments, faculty & administrations move too slowly (and, besides, they are party to illegal software agreements with Microsoft which effectively prohibit competition). OOF would get a lot of coders from universities and schools -- not to mention accelerate the vital Localization efforts which already produce over 70 language versions of OpenOffice with very little dedicated organization.

You're firing, Jono, on all cylinders!