Android: the return of the Unix wars?

I think there's a certain amount of evidence available just by looking at Android itself - despite actively trying to get their kernel changes upstream for some time, most of the kernel work hasn't been merged, and a lot of it will never be. The best we can hope is that eventually, after a substantial expenditure of effort, the kernel may eventually get the means to do what Google needs using a different design.

Yes, the kernel is a particularly difficult area in which to get changes merged, but I'd still be astonished if traditionally proprietary companies actually went to the effort of getting non-trivial changes to open source projects merged upstream, rather than just providing a big code dump.