And companies that want to take advantage of freely available volunteer run hardware/physical projects wouldn't want to commit their own resources to improve th

And companies that want to take advantage of freely available volunteer run hardware/physical projects wouldn't want to commit their own resources to improve them for their needs? I don't see anything about this model that wouldn't directly translate into these sorts of projects. Why exactly couldn't physically based open source projects have both paid and non-paid volunteers, just like software projects do?