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?
Consider this; at what point was the first person hired to work on the kernel? At what point were there a majority of patches submitted by paid workers?
^And then consider that up until that point, it was all unpaid. Just... think for a while, just think please.
