Nadia Eghbal (now Nadia Asparouhova) is the most influential analyst of the maintainer-sustainability-crisis — the structural problem that FOSS projects that power critical digital infrastructure are routinely maintained by unpaid or underpaid individuals with no institutional support.
Her 2016 report roads-and-bridges-2016, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, framed FOSS as public digital infrastructure analogous to roads and bridges: critical, load-bearing, and systematically underfunded. The report named the problem at a moment when incidents like the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL (2014) and the left-pad npm incident (2016) had made the fragility of FOSS infrastructure impossible to ignore. By 2016, the FOSS world was entering the modern-foss-and-sustainability-crisis-2015-present era, and "Roads and Bridges" gave that era a diagnostic frame.
Her 2020 book working-in-public-eghbal-2020 (Stripe Press) extended the analysis into a study of modern maintainer dynamics in the github-platform era. The book distinguished between different community structures (federations, clubs, stadiums, toys) based on the ratio of contributors to users, and argued that the open source contribution model had fundamentally changed: most "contributions" now come from a large mass of one-time contributors and a tiny core of maintainers who bear all the costs of maintaining quality and coherence. The asymmetry between maintainer burden and user benefit is a structural feature of the ecosystem, not a problem solvable by more contributions.
Eghbal worked at GitHub (2016–2018) and the Substack funding model reflects her broader interest in creator economy structures that might apply to FOSS maintainers. She has subsequently written under the name Nadia Asparouhova on broader themes of patronage, institutional decline, and knowledge infrastructure.
Her work is unusual in the FOSS literature for being neither advocacy (in the tradition of richard-stallman) nor technical (in the tradition of eric-raymond) but sociological and economic — asking what structural conditions are necessary for FOSS to function as infrastructure.