[SwellJoe]

"6. You can start a project in one of the open source communities like sourceforge put some high level specs and see whether any one will be interested in joining you."

This is a rather persistent myth about Open Source. It's entirely fiction. If you post a working version to sf.net, you'll probably get a few bug reports and a few questions. If you work on it for a year, and do something really valuable to a lot of people, you'll see a few patches. If you work on it for another year, and continue to add value for a large technical audience, you may have a few parties who are interested in joining the project in a serious way.

Open Source software does not spring into existence. Nearly every project has one (or more) extremely dedicated developers pushing it forward every day. A non-programmer wishing something into existence is not going to make anything happen. I promise.