A Ford Foundation report by nadia-eghbal, published approximately July 2016, that reframed the FOSS sustainability problem as an infrastructure problem. The report's central metaphor — open source software as roads and bridges, critical public infrastructure that everyone uses but few fund — became the dominant frame for discussions of maintainer sustainability in the modern-foss-and-sustainability-crisis-2015-present era.
Argument
Eghbal documented that the internet's critical infrastructure runs overwhelmingly on open source software maintained by small groups of individuals, often working without compensation. The Heartbleed vulnerability (2014) — a critical flaw in OpenSSL, maintained by two people managing security infrastructure for a significant portion of the internet — had made this structural vulnerability viscerally apparent.
The report argued that this is a market failure analogous to public infrastructure: the software has high social value but its public-good nature (non-excludable, non-rivalrous) means the market undersupplies maintenance. Commercial users benefit without paying; individual maintainers bear costs without being able to capture value. The result is systematic underinvestment in maintenance, security review, and succession planning.
Eghbal catalogued the costs: maintainer burnout, security vulnerabilities, abandoned projects, the concentration of critical infrastructure in the hands of small numbers of individuals with no formal accountability.
Movement Impact
The report shifted the sustainability conversation from "how do individual projects fund themselves" (the frame of magic-cauldron-1999) to "how does the commons as a whole get maintained." It connected FOSS sustainability to the broader literature on commons-based-peer-production and public goods theory.
The report influenced multiple funding initiatives: the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (launched after Heartbleed), GitHub's Sponsors program, and the Open Source Security Foundation. It also established Eghbal as a central voice in sustainability discussions, leading to her book working-in-public-eghbal-2020, which extended the analysis.
The roads-and-bridges metaphor has limits that Eghbal later explored more fully: roads are built by governments with legal authority and tax revenue; open source is built by a distributed volunteer community with no legal basis for mandatory contribution. The solutions available to public infrastructure (taxation, regulation, eminent domain) are not available to open source. What works in their place remained — and remains — an open question.