Presumably these companies are free to provide their software for research. The onus is on them to demonstrate it works in the first place.... > how do we know

Presumably these companies are free to provide their software for research. The onus is on them to demonstrate it works in the first place.... > how do we know this isn’t a problem they have worked extensively on and made great improvements to, relative to the open source components? They are a private, for-profit entity with a strong incentive to mislead people about their products. I see no reason to assume they've addressed this issue.