I contribute to open source plenty. My company hardly makes any profit. We put it all back into r&d because we like making stuff. Employing engineers then allows them to also contribute to open source. But we have to sell stuff to keep things going. And if we made improvement to the ffmpeg source, we'd definitely publish it. But we didn't. We just used it in an embedded solution which had a bunch of custom apps gluing it all together. We did what many others have done, but ffmpeg decided to try to shake us down (they literally asked for a payout to make it go away). Corporate litigation is stupidly expensive and not what we want to spend our time on. I don't really care. We had fun making the device and learned a bunch. We just also learned to avoid ffmpeg like the plague.