John,
This is not entirely unprescedented. Dbase was purchased from borland some years ago. Check out www.dbase2000.com

One difficulty will be prying fox from Microsoft. I am not so sure they would want fox out there in the wild. However, it never hurts to ask. They might just give it away.

The real difficulty will be finding qualified people to manage the source as well. If it was managed under open source you would have an easier time of it.

Rodman