But GE isn't paying engineers to put out new lightbulb filament designs to the public (and other companies).
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many, many other companies are literally building tools for their competitors.
That's so outside the realm of possibility in any other industry that a copyright lawyer (or executive) in any heavily-patented field would laugh you out of their office for suggesting something like that.
This happens all the time across all sorts of industries. Where do you think things like ASTM standards come from? Companies pay people to participate in developing open standards that benefit themselves as well as their competitors.
