> I think one real question to ask though is what is actually more efficient—donating volunteer time and energy to a nonprofit, or donating money and having that nonprofit hire professionals instead?

That's a good question. Judging from software development (which may or may not map perfectly to hardware infrastructure) both seem to work pretty well. Depending on who you ask you'll get different answers about whether closed (purely paid) or open (either volunteer or mixed) is "winning".

But certainly they seem to both work, on the whole. Neither strategy is so radically inefficient that it's safe to dismiss a company that relies on one over the other.