  The widespread adoption of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) means
that the ongoing maintenance of many widely used software components relies on
the collaborative effort of volunteers who set their own priorities and choose
their own tasks. We argue that this has created a new form of risk that we call
'underproduction' which occurs when the supply of software engineering labor
becomes out of alignment with the demand of people who rely on the software
produced. We present a conceptual framework for identifying relative
underproduction in software as well as a statistical method for applying our
framework to a comprehensive dataset from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
that includes 21,902 source packages and the full history of 461,656 bugs. We
draw on this application to present two experiments: (1) a demonstration of how
our technique can be used to identify at-risk software packages in a large
FLOSS repository and (2) a validation of these results using an alternate
indicator of package risk. Our analysis demonstrates both the utility of our
approach and reveals the existence of widespread underproduction in a range of
widely-installed software components in Debian.
