An Apache licensed project with no commercial offering will happily incorporate your improvements whenever they meet its quality standards and scope. Now, when the company controlling the upstream project is chafging for the same functionality your patches provide... let's just say ut is going to be harder to contribute them upstream.
That's why I find it a no-brainer to invest in and contribute back to open source projects without "paid features available" whereas I will avoid the same project when they do.
Projects where maintainers get money through support contracts are fine for me, although a similar argument may be made regarding the project's documentation/easiness of configuration.
