With all the discourse and disruption caused by DnD 4e, I was thinking about a social experiment that would use input/supprt from the gaming community to create the core rules of an open standard gaming system, that would not see the kind of turbulent changes that DnD has seen in the past 7 years.

Those that make meaningful contributions would have rights to publish/sell supplements.

Just an idea.

It is an Idea worth going forward. I would suggest you to go forward with all your might with the idea you have. It is worth to spend your money and efforts.

The online d20 srd hasn't changed recently, nor have some other old ogl games. The problem of creating a "core rules" system is that we already have quite a few, it would have to be pretty genius to get all of their fans to switch to it. I suspect that not only do you want a stable base, but one that you can work on reliably. In that sense what you probably need is an unusually tight set of compatibility rules, so that it can truly act as an extensible core, as opposed to a similarity between different games. That's tricky to do although it feels like you could do it within certain limits, as the feats system almost proved.