@Kyle: I hope Noah's answer and comment have clarified our position. I'm quite happy with SO, and I realize that they are interested in communities doing well. However, there's simply no guarantee that their interests won't conflict with ours. The point isn't that I really want to be a moderator on MO, it's that if there is ever a real conflict between SO and MO, somebody in the MO community has to have the power to completely move the site onto another platform. Maintaining ownership of the domain and access to full data dumps is necessary for that.

I certainly hope there won't ever be such a problem, but the whole point of negotiating a contract is that your relationship may change. If your friend promises to pay for all repairs to your house so long as you hand over the deed, it may sound like a great deal. After all, who cares whose name is on the paper? You keep living in your house, but somebody else pays for all the repairs. However, the name on the paper may become very important if your friend's interests ever start to diverge from yours. With any luck, you'll be friends forever, but you'd be a fool to treat that assumption as a certainty.

And Andrea's as well.

(Well, someone had to say it)

One interesting long term possibility is an extension of Stack Overflow Careers to MathOverflow. Now, there are lots of reasons why this might be inappropriate --- in particular, no one is about to seriously propose changing the way that academic hiring works --- but there may well be more overlap between our user base and the people that certain companies are looking to hire than you might at first think. Stack Overflow Careers actually seems to do a pretty good job at its niche --- really good programming companies hiring really good programmers. If Fog Creek were interested in trying to monetize MathOverflow by creating a parallel, unobtrusive site for mathematicians to post CVs and companies to post mathematician-wanted ads, then I wouldn't object at all, and good luck to them! :-)

yes. Essentially, the StackExchange people have told us that we can migrate, and they'll contact us at some point about the details of how this will work. We've been told that there is some scope for negotiating with existing StackExchange sites about the actual terms of the migration, but (to my knowledge) this hasn't actually happened at all yet. The StackExchange people like us --- Anton has talked, in person and via email, with a number of people in the company, including Joel Spolsky, right at the top, and we generally get the impression they want to treat us right. On the other hand, it's been a slightly frustrating process not hearing much from them about the transition to 2.0. We have a set of 3 incontrovertible requirements for switching, all of which go against the rules for new StackExchange 2.0 sites.

1. Anton maintains personal ownership of the mathoverflow.net domain name.
2. We continue to have access to the full unsanitized database dumps.
3. Anton continues to have administrator privileges on the site.

(re: 2, all of the StackExchange 2.0 sites will have public data dumps equivalent to what we already provide here. At present, only Anton has access to the unsanitized dumps, and the main purpose of these is so that we can in principle jump ship to an alternative software base.)

So --- we're waiting and seeing, for now!