Haddock - of course they do! This is how all serious free software project are working. Usually there is a group - 2-3 people is one of the major Linux company, then 4-5 people in a University. This group is getting few millions per year from grants from various companies, like AMD in that particular case. Even non-Linux companies spend money of free software. For example, Sun started their Linux small server brand after purchasing the small Linux company (forgot the name, iCube?). But they started to write few million checks to Linux community a while ago, maybe 5 years ago at least. Sun was the main contributor into XEmacs project. They also wrote many checks to FSF without concentrating on any particular project. Few years ago they started the massive support of Gnome project, and under Gnome brand there are more then hundred sub-projects, and that's millions of lines of code. Gnome has at least 50 full-time people and thousands part-time. This is comparable to the amount of people Microsoft has in core Windows group.
This is how it works.
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