  Because open source software relies on individuals who select their own
tasks, it is often underproduced -- a term used by software engineering
researchers to describe when a piece of software's relative quality is lower
than its relative importance. We examine the social and technical factors
associated with underproduction through a comparison of software packaged by
the Debian GNU/Linux community. We test a series of hypotheses developed from a
reading of prior research in software engineering. Although we find that
software age and programming language age offer a partial explanation for
variation in underproduction, we were surprised to find that the association
between underproduction and package age is weaker at high levels of programming
language age. With respect to maintenance efforts, we find that additional
resources are not always tied to better outcomes. In particular, having higher
numbers of contributors is associated with higher underproduction risk. Also,
contrary to our expectations, maintainer turnover and maintenance by a declared
team are not associated with lower rates of underproduction. Finally, we find
that the people working on bugs in underproduced packages tend to be those who
are more central to the community's collaboration network structure, although
contributors' betweenness centrality (often associated with brokerage in social
networks) is not associated with underproduction.
