Community source development has emerged as a new way of developing enterprise applications, leading to a unique type of open source development involving collaborative investment decisions by multiple institutional partners. A critical research question is what motivates partnering institutions...

This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...