If I'm understanding your post correctly, ... His resulting behavior as a developer is thus guided by a strategic effort to box competition out and hold his cards close to his chest?
I would find this hard to believe.
I'm gonna wave the experience card at this point. I've been an open source contributor for about 16 years, starting with
pyapache back in 2001 and later with the
RDFLib team and other projects thereafter.
To quote Roy Batty ... I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Cheers
Graham