Google recently hired a major Gaim developer, and now they're actively ignoring work the community has done http://www.livejournal.com/users/bleeter/12357.html and http://www.chipx86.com/blog/archives/000132.html

On the contrary, google is helping gaim out. From the gaim sf page: "You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near future."

I don't know.. Those blog posts seem pretty sincere. The thing about OSS is that it's more natural and imperfect. Over time, the imperfections make for opprotunities of evolution and progression. If Google is helping to create an elitest programming culture, even though they build great dynamic code, it will fail to adapt over the long term.