Building Open source projects from commercial products

Started an open source project from a commercial product is not easy. If the time has passed when open source was seen as the panacea to revive a dying product, the difficulties to reach success still are the same, as is illustrated by Sun's OpenSolaris difficulties building a community of contributors. But is a community of contributors really what Sun wants?

Building a community requires openness of the code, the development process, and the pricipal developers, ie developers from the company initially developing the product. But Sun's certainly not the worst example.