Adventures in job-searching, from a Christian movie casting post: We pray before every shoot and believe God will anoint the actors with performances that will stun theatrical audiences. “Gravity” is a family motion picture that will be enjoyed by theatrical audiences worldwide even if they have no Judeo Christian experience. Fuck yeah, prepare for anointment, bitches!
Art, to answer your easiest quest, Gurps is a skill-based point-buy system. I'm not all that knowledgeable of it myself, despite buying 3 billion books at the Gamekeeper fire sale, but essentially for most rolls you roll 3d6, trying to roll under either your stat, or your skill.
For your OGL/business questions I would head over to www.rpg.net, register for an account (free), and post your questions in their Business forum since I think for the most part The Action Team knows fuck-all about the business end of RPG publishing. (Although Eric has researched the brick-and-mortar end quite a bit.)
As far as skill-based systems go, GURPS is the classic, and they just released their new edition so for the next year or so new releases in that line will still seem shiny and exciting. I have no idea how their licensing arrangements work, though; all of their books are published by SJ Games, and most of their books are either general-use (Romans, Dragons, etc.) or are tied to already-existing fiction licenses. I haven't seen a lot of new, original settings coming out of there.
I personally am a fan of Savage Worlds as well, which is also a skill-based system and from my brief research offers pretty good publishing deals. Of course they have a much smaller slice of the RPG pie than GURPS has (which itself has a much smaller slice than D&D/d20). However, they do pretty well for themselves, and they have a small but active fanbase.
SW has a pretty specific philosophy, which is that their system is geared for fast, finite campaigns, which a good amount of tactical crunch but simple and fast combat and record-keeping. If you are planning for a d20 level of complexity then they're not what you're looking for.