Mohawk Software has been independently developing software for over a decade, and there are a lot of internal projects that can be brought out as GPL projects, here is a list of the top four:

FTSS: Full Text Search System
A scalable pre-indexing text search system with phrase ranking and metaphone translation. FTSS has a variety of "plugins" allowing custom input interfaces and formats, search request output communications protocol and formats, word translators and more. FTSS currently supports PGSQL, ODBC, Sqlite, and MySQL as input sources, and provides HTTP request, with raw text or XML output formats.

CGR: Computer Generated Recommendations
A collaborative filtering system that analyzes a large community of users to create a statistical analysis of trends and relationships between characteristics and a server which uses this data with a specific user's information to create a list of a user's likely characteristics. Like MCache and FTSS, CGR also has an extensive plugin strategy that allows operational modification. CGR currently supports PGSQL, ODBC, Sqlite, and MySQL as input sources, and provides HTTP request, with raw text or XML output formats.

IDA: Information Director/Aggregator
Both FTSS and CGR, while very capable, are not infinitely so. The Director Aggregator is a system that distributes requests across multiple systems, merges the result sets, and returns a single result set. This is used to create n-tier service platforms.

MWS: Mohawk Web Services
While admittedly, yet another HTTP system, MWS is used to provide small footprint web services for applications.

The above projects are what I call "consultantware," they exist in a quasi-experimental state and are hacked, tested, and released as needed for a clients specific needs. At any random point in time, they are usually broken because of "drift" in the various dependent libraries they use.

While there are a number of smaller project that could be put out there, these four are probably the most widely usable. Of course, the person or persons who wish to provide funding will have a serious impact on the consideration of which project is next.:-)

Anyone seeking to fund a project, please email markw at mohawksoft dot com.