> No. You can't pay rent with their improvements and there's only certain types of software, and a handful of titles, that these companies modify like that.

I don't know about that. I suspect that a lot of the time, when a company wants to use modified open source software, they pay someone to make the modifications. Usually, they hire their own person, because they can pay them to make the modifications and then they own those modifications and can keep them internally, but that has a lot of costs: they have to pay the person to become familiar with the source code. It's much cheaper to pay the original developer to make the modifications you want, because they are already familiar with the source code. So if companies couldn't keep the results of the developers' work, they might as well pay the original developer to make the modifications, which both pays the developer's rent, and allows them the choice of what parts of the modifications to include in the end product.

> Funding open source development needs to be across-the-board inclusive, it is the "R" in "R&D". Open source benefits from a massive parallel pipeline of bad projects and inferior efforts and abandoned ideas from which comes great stuff, but even the bad stuff can teach a lot.

This is a good point.

If those improvements align with your customers' goals then yes, you can pay rent with them.