That's wisely put.

As I look at the landscape, I'm actually inclined to think that opensolaris is usefully distinct enough from *BSDs, with interesting and rich tools and infrastructure to attract developers from (esp.) the *BSD kernel development communities, if it becomes clear that a clearer cut opportunity to do this exists.

Also, it looks to me as if the internal Solaris devs actually liked having an open process, and valued being open source, and that while a lot of the reasons for keeping the development and design communication internal were competitive, they were also just intended to avoid taxing the productivity of a very productive team. I'm surprised Sun's solaris devs wouldn't have tried to make more (perhaps piecewise) efforts to engage external developers in areas where those interests wouldn't conflict, and, perhaps they still might.

Project caiman the installer? I don't follow.

For what it's worth, Deerfield High School (which also served Highland Park, among other places) made computing available in a form that encouraged creativity--one of the best things about it was the lack of any relation to classroom activity.