Software Product Line (SPL) and Open Source Software (OSS) haveemerged as successful modes of developing software. Although they appear todiffer in terms of development principles and processes, researchers andpractitioners have been increasingly emphasising the need to achieve synergiesby exploiting the ever growing repositories of OSS components for developingSPLs. While there have been calls for the SPL community to accelerate thewidespread use of OSS in SPL, less attention has been paid to how OSScommunities could increase the use of OSS components in SPL. Sincearchitectural issues are considered critical in the SPL community, we proposethat an increased attention on architectural aspects of OSS components mayprovide the confidence that organizations need in order for them to choose anduse OSS components in SPL. We identify a number of architectural practiceswhich are followed by the SPL community and discuss the possibilities for andpotential benefits of incorporating those practices in OSS developmentprocesses.