I'm keenly watching the conversation on structural imbalances in funding and use of free and open source software. Nadia Eghbal's recent essay has garnered attention, and here I collect some additional posts and threads by others about this disparity in the economics of FLOSS:

• "Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects" by Benjamin Mako Hill, originally published 2005, revised November 2012.
• "Seeing like a Geek" by Tom Slee, June 2012. "...the Open Data Movement demands that data ... be accessible to rich and poor alike, like justice and the Ritz. It insists that any measures governments would like to take to favour--for example--non-commercial users or local users, be taken off the table."
• "The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community" by Ashe Dryden, November 2013.
• "For Love and For Money" by Audrey Eschright, June 2015. "What if it this framework was always about money? The purpose of sanctioning open source licenses at all is to create a regulatory environment for commercial use of code."
• "Funding OSS" by Cory Benfield, August 2015.
• "The Predatory Search And Exploitation of Free Labor" by Cameron G., September 2015. "This is the truth that too many marginalized workers are now familiar with: the industries we know and love are being built on our free labor, our hunt for 'experience,' and our naivety about our worth."
• The paying the piper discussion forum on GitHub, started October 2015. Concentrating on the need to fund "full time, dedicated project management and contribution staff."
• "Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix" by Ian Cordasco, November 2015. "Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers."
• "Relying on volunteering is more unfair than you think" by Sasha, November 2015.
• "Open Source Work" by Ryan Bigg, November 2015. "As of today I am quitting all maintenance roles / responsibilities of any open source project I am involved in."
• "The Acute Pain and Chronic Reward of Public-Facing Work" by Trey Causey, November 2015.
• "Funding free software" by Ned Batchelder, November 2015.
• Hypatia Software Organization ("Software engineer mentorships empowering transgender women") started, November 2015. December: shares estimates on revenue and distribution. [Update: Lillian Lemmer, the Executive Director of Hypatia Software Organization, reached out to me in February to share an updated Transparency link.]
• "How to help your favourite open source project" by David R. MacIver, December 2015.
• "Launching Jazzband" by Jannis Leidel, December 2015. "Jazzband is a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software projects."
• "Starters and Maintainers" by James Long, December 2015.
• "GPL enforcement is a social good" by Matthew Garrett, December 2015.
• dear GitHub (an open letter to GitHub from FLOSS maintainers), initiated by James Kyle, January 2016.
• No Maintenance Intended signal/initiative initiated by Potch, January 2016. "Tell people your code is open source, but not actively maintained."
• "Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation" by Matthew Garrett, January 2016.
• Crowdsourced FLOSS project list, started by Nadia Eghbal and improved by Jannis Gebauer, January 2016. Lists FLOSS projects in need of various kinds of support.

I include above some pieces that, on the surface, are adjacent to this conversation rather than in it: on open data, on emotional burnout, on GitHub's tooling, on license compliance, on setting expectations about unmaintained projects. But I see these frustrations as -- like the injustice driving volunteer maintainers to step away -- coming from a fundamental perception of unfairness. Free and open source software makers will notice if there is no measure of reciprocity in an environment that pays lip service to gift culture.

My next step probably ought to be reading the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom: "groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources." I do hope so.