> See Redhat Linux, Gitlab, Chromium, Docker. If a volunteer helps triage issues for these projects, is it a violation of labor laws?

Perhaps this is an indicator that for-profit companies that solicit volunteer contributions to open source projects should set up a non-profit organization to manage the open source project separately from the for-profit business that sells support and / or provides paid turnkey solutions.

> particularly during a time when we're increasingly worried about Open Source funding and sustainability.

I don't think any of the open source projects owned by for-profit companies you list have sustainability issues. It is possible it would reduce the degree to which for-profit companies accept pull-requests to their open source software , but it might also encourage the adoption of more open governance of corporate run open-source projects. It might also push more volunteer developer hours towards those projects that aren't owned by for-profit interests and help solve some of the sustainability issues those projects face.

> I really like that I can get involved with Gitlab. I don't feel like Gitlab is exploiting me.

The issue is less that volunteers (such as you) are exploited / negatively impacted, since these volunteers are participating voluntarily. The issue is more that allowing companies to have "free employees" unfairly competes with the hiring of people who can't or don't want to volunteer their time.

Since software developers currently enjoy high salaries, you may not see this as much of a downside. However, writers, editors, moderators, photographers and other 'creative' professions often don't see the same levels of compensation as software developers. It seems potentially a little greedy to me to insist that highly paid software developers retain the right to volunteer on a wider range of software projects at the expense of lower salaries for workers in other professions.