What makes an open source project “critical digital infrastructure?

There is currently no clear policy argument to help define which open source projects can be considered critical digital infrastructure. Answers to the question of what makes digital infrastructure critical will inform other important economic and governance questions in the digital age, including many of the supporting research questions we aim to explore in this project. In answering these questions we will bridge a quest for a legal definition with an investigation of the values, methods, and funding relationships of the groups that build open source software projects.