I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be st

I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be stuck with an old version, not able to benefit from the larger development community. There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs. Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.) Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...