Comment by akerro

Yes it does make a difference.

There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.