I almost had that experience with one of the popular PC liquid cooling hardware vendors around 10 years ago. I emailed them saying I'd be interested in develop

I almost had that experience with one of the popular PC liquid cooling hardware vendors around 10 years ago. I emailed them saying I'd be interested in developing drivers for their hardware for Linux as I was a happy customer and was immediately put in touch with one of the managers and their engineering team. Made quite a bit of progress before the whole thing was shut down because one of their component vendors threatened them saying it'd be a breach of their contract with them. Apparently that vendor sold a "datacenter" (non consumer) version of that hardware for which they charged a hefty license fee for the management software (which was Linux compatible). Jokes on them, someone reverse engineered the whole thing with a USB analyzer years later and published it XD. (not me)