I'm not going to name the company, but another extreme example comes to mind was of an early stage company in a specific vertical who completely funded a relati

I'm not going to name the company, but another extreme example comes to mind was of an early stage company in a specific vertical who completely funded a relatively high-profile (read: well hyped) open source project that was orthogonal but not completely related to the core competencies and interests of the parent company. I would have been strongly against this if I was an advisor or investor in the company. Suffice to say, things ended badly when the company ran out of money and now both their project and the open source project are dead in the water, + lots of hurt feelings all around.