Benevolent dictator for life

From HandWiki
Short description: Title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders
For the political term, see Benevolent dictatorship.

Benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is a tongue-in-cheek title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community. The phrase originated in 1995 with reference to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.[1][2]

History

Shortly after Van Rossum joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the term appeared in a follow-up mail by Ken Manheimer to a meeting trying to create a semi-formal group that would oversee Python development and workshops; this initial use included an additional joke of naming Van Rossum the "First Interim BDFL". The title was initially came up with as "Benevolent Dictator" by Ken Manheimer and later it was Barry Warsaw that suggested it would be "Benevolent Dictator for Life".[3]

In July 2018, Van Rossum announced that he would be stepping down as BDFL of Python without appointing a successor, effectively eliminating the title within the Python community structure.[4]

Usage

BDFL should not be confused with the more common term for open-source leaders, "benevolent dictator", which was popularized by Eric S. Raymond's essay "Homesteading the Noosphere" (1999).[5]

Among other topics related to hacker culture, Raymond elaborates on how the nature of open source forces the "dictatorship" to keep itself benevolent, since a strong disagreement can lead to the forking of the project under the rule of new leaders.[citation needed] Most open source software development projects utilize distributed version control systems, in which contributors submit pull requests to the project's maintainer, who may merge or reject the submission. Other distributed copies of the software are then based on that maintainer's repo. The position of BDFL is a consequence of network effect; they become stewards of the overall project on account of being the repo that the rest of the community is subscribed to and submits changes to.

Referent candidates

Key
dagger Deceased
Name Project Type Reference
Sylvain Benner Spacemacs Community-driven Emacs distribution [6]
Vitalik Buterin Ethereum Blockchain-based cryptocurrency - Dries Buytaert Drupal Content management framework
François Chollet Keras Deep learning framework [8]
Evan Czaplicki Elm Front-end web programming language [9][10]
Laurent Destailleur Dolibarr ERP CRM Software suite for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management [11]
David Heinemeier Hansson Ruby on Rails Web framework [12]
Rich Hickey Clojure Programming language [13]
Adrian Holovaty
and Jacob Kaplan-Moss 		Django Web framework [14]
Andrew Kelley Zig Programming language [15][16]
Xavier Leroy OCaml Programming language [17][18]
Haoyuan Li Alluxio Data Orchestration System [19]
Miles Lubin JuMP Mathematical optimization modeling language in Julia [20]
Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) Ruby Programming language [21]
Wes McKinney Pandas Python data analysis library [22]
Gavin Mendel-Gleason[lower-alpha 1] TerminusDB Open-source graph database for knowledge graph representation [23][24]
Bram Moolenaardagger Vim Text editor [25]
Matt Mullenweg[lower-alpha 2] WordPress Content management framework [26]
Martin Odersky Scala Programming language [27]
Taylor Otwell Laravel Web framework [28][29]
Theo de Raadt OpenBSD A Unix-like operating system
Arnold Robbins Awk, Gawk Programming language [30]
Eugen Rochko Mastodon Open source, decentralized social network [31]
Ton Roosendaal[lower-alpha 3] Blender 3D computer graphics software [32]
Sébastien Ros Orchard Project Content management system [33]
Mark Shuttleworth[lower-alpha 4] Ubuntu Linux distribution [34]
Jeremy Soller Redox Operating system [35]
Don Syme[lower-alpha 5] F# Programming language [36]
Linus Torvalds[lower-alpha 6] Linux Operating system kernel [12][37]
José Valim Elixir Programming language [38]
Pauli Virtanen SciPy Python library used for scientific and technical computing [39][40]
Patrick Volkerding Slackware GNU/Linux distribution [41]
Nathan Voxland Liquibase Database schema management [42]
Jimmy Wales Wikimedia Foundation Collaborative knowledge project [43][lower-roman 1]
Jeremy Walker Exercism Open-source programming education platform [44]
Shaun Walker DotNetNuke Web application framework [45]
Larry Wall Perl Programming language [46]
Evan You Vue.js JavaScript MVVM framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications.
Soumith Chintala PyTorch Deep learning framework [47]
Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips Trino SQL query engine [48]
Kohsuke Kawaguchi Jenkins Automation server [49]
Gabor de Mooij RedBeanPHP Database object relational mapper [50]
Bram Cohen BitTorrent Peer-to-peer file sharing protocol [51]
Walter Bright D (programming language) Programming language
Ritchie Vink Polars Data analysis framework [52]
William Falcon PyTorch Lightning Deep learning framework [53]
Lars Hvam abapGit Git client for ABAP [54]
Sebastián Ramírez FastAPI Web framework for building APIs with Python [55]
Bill Hall (gingerBill) Odin Programming language [56]
Damien Elmes (dae) Anki Spaced repetition system [57][58]

Organizational positions

  1. ↑ CTO of TerminusDB
  2. ↑ Lead Developer at the WordPress Foundation
  3. ↑ Chairman of the Blender Foundation
  4. ↑ CEO of Canonical Ltd. until December 2009, again since July 2017
  5. ↑ Technical Advisor at the F# Software Foundation
  6. ↑ Sponsee of the Linux Foundation. Also holds the trademark for Linux.

See also

  • Design by dictator

References

  1. ↑ Disputed by Wales; "I am not the benevolent dictator of anything"
  1. ↑ Guido van Rossum (2008-07-31). "Origin of BDFL". Artima.com. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=235725. 
  2. ↑ "Python Creator Scripts Inside Google". eWeek. 2006-03-06. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Python-Creator-Scripts-Inside-Google/. Retrieved 2008-05-13. 
  3. ↑ CultRepo (formerly Honeypot) (2025-08-28). Python: The Documentary | An origin story. Retrieved 2025-08-31 – via YouTube.
  4. ↑ Van Rossum, Guido (July 12, 2018). "Transfer of power". https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-July/005664.html. 
  5. ↑ Raymond, Eric S. (2000). "Homesteading the Noosphere § Project Structures and Ownership". http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/ar01s16.html. 
  6. ↑ "Spacemacs COMMUNITY.org". https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/COMMUNITY.org#maintainer. 
  7. ↑ Pearson, Jordan (24 April 2017). "Ethereum's Boy King Is Thinking About Giving Up the Mantle" (in en). Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ethereums-boy-king-is-thinking-about-giving-up-the-mantle/. "One participant called him a benevolent dictator." 
  8. ↑ "Keras API Special Interest Group, Leadership". December 21, 2021. https://github.com/keras-team/governance. 
  9. ↑ "56: Ember vs. Elm: The Showdown with Philip Poots | The Frontside Podcast". https://frontsidethepodcast.simplecast.fm/56. 
  10. ↑ elm-conf (2016-09-19), "Code is the Easy Part" by Evan Czaplicki, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSjbTC-hvqQ&list=PLglJM3BYAMPH2zuz1nbKHQyeawE4SN0Cd, retrieved 2017-08-14 
  11. ↑ "Dolibarr project organization, different roles of actors". https://wiki.dolibarr.org/index.php/Dolibarr_Project#Developer_grade_Yoda_.28GIT_project_and_commit_leader.2C_head_release_manager.29. 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Constine, Josh (December 7, 2012). "Dropbox Hires Away Google's Guido Van Rossum, The Father Of Python". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/07/dropbox-guido-van-rossum-python/. 
  13. ↑ "Clojure JIRA Workflow". http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/JIRA+workflow. 
  14. ↑ "Adrian and Jacob retiring as Django BDFLs". Adrian Holovaty. January 12, 2014. http://www.holovaty.com/writing/bdfls-retiring. 
  15. ↑ "Proposal: Create a standard process for proposals.". https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/994#issuecomment-387211361. 
  16. ↑ "Interfacing with Zig, a BDFL-run Project". December 10, 2021. https://kristoff.it/blog/interfacing-with-zig/. 
  17. ↑ "A History of OCaml | OCaml.org". http://ocaml.org/learn/history.html. 
  18. ↑ "OCaml Infrastructure mailing list". http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/infrastructure/2015-September/000535.html. 
  19. ↑ Introducing Alluxio Open Source Project Governance "[1]"
  20. ↑ "Governance Structure: JuMP". https://jump.dev/pages/governance/. 
  21. ↑ "A Ruby Design Process". https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7549. 
  22. ↑ "pandas 0.20.3 documentation: Tutorials". http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/tutorials.html.  "Wes McKinney's (pandas BDFL) blog"
  23. ↑ "TerminusDB, Twitter". May 6, 2020. https://twitter.com/TerminusDB/status/1258076649393971200. 
  24. ↑ "TerminusDB — what's in a name?". TerminusDB. August 21, 2019. https://terminusdb.com/blog/terminusdb-whats-in-a-name/. 
  25. ↑ "Why Neovim is Better than Vim". January 15, 2015. http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim. 
  26. ↑ "Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress | Post Status". July 24, 2015. https://poststatus.com/thesis-automattic-and-wordpress/. 
  27. ↑ "Programming in Scala Leaps onto the World Stage!". http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=245420. 
  28. ↑ "Taylor Otwell, Twitter". Taylor Otwell. October 9, 2014. https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/520294534060601344. 
  29. ↑ "Taylor Otwell, Creator of the Laravel PHP Framework". August 5, 2014. https://www.facebook.com/events/731585693566905/. 
  30. ↑ Robbins, Arnold (March 2014). "The GNU Project and Me: 27 Years with GNU AWK". http://www.skeeve.com/gnu-awk-and-me-2014.pdf. 
  31. ↑ "Mastodon is crumbling—and many blame its creator". January 18, 2019. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fediverse-eugen-rochko/. 
  32. ↑ "Developer Intro/Overview". https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Developer_Intro/Overview#Decisions. 
  33. ↑ "Orchard Project Steering Committee". http://orchardproject.net/about. 
  34. ↑ "Ubuntu carves niche in Linux landscape". CNET. http://news.cnet.com/Ubuntu+carves+niche+in+Linux+landscape/2100-7344_3-5886194.html. 
  35. ↑ "CONTRIBUTING.md · master · redox-os / redox". July 8, 2023. https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md. 
  36. ↑ "Contributing to the F# Language and Compiler". https://fsharp.github.io/2014/06/18/fsharp-contributions.html. 
  37. ↑ Dee-Ann LeBlanc (31 July 2006). Linux For Dummies (7th ed.). John Wiley & Sons. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-470-04793-4. https://books.google.com/books?id=dy1FxtIsGhIC&pg=PA15. 
  38. ↑ "Elixir Companies". https://github.com/doomspork/elixir-companies/blob/master/README.md. 
  39. ↑ "SciPy 1.0.0". https://github.com/scipy/scipy/releases. 
  40. ↑ "SciPy project governance". https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/doc/source/dev/governance/governance.rst. 
  41. ↑ "Stories of Linux: A Look at Slackware Linux". linux.com. http://www.linux.com/component/content/article/197-stories-of-linux/441699-the-story-of-linux-a-look-at-slackware-linux. 
  42. ↑ "User and Developer Community | Post Status". http://www.liquibase.org/community/. 
  43. ↑ Chozick, Amy (June 27, 2013). "Jimmy Wales is Not an Internet Billionaire". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/jimmy-wales-is-not-an-internet-billionaire.html. 
  44. ↑ "Jeremy Walker on Being the BDFL of Exercism by Humans of Open Source • A podcast on Anchor" (in en). https://anchor.fm/humans-of-open-source/episodes/Jeremy-Walker-on-Being-the-BDFL-of-Exercism-emh81g. 
  45. ↑ Book: Building Websites with DotNetNuke 5, Michael Washington and Ian Lackey, Packt Publishing. Page 14 "The core team comprises individuals invited to join the team by Shaun Walker, whom they affectionately call the "Benevolent Dictator".
  46. ↑ "The Art of Ballistic Programming". http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/node/154. 
  47. ↑ "PyTorch Governance | Maintainers — PyTorch 2.0 documentation". https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/community/persons_of_interest.html. 
  48. ↑ Trino and the BDFL model https://trino.io/blog/2023/04/06/trino-bdfl-focus.html
  49. ↑ Jenkins Enhancement Proposal #1: BDFL https://github.com/jenkinsci/jep/blob/master/jep/1/README.adoc#bdfl
  50. ↑ RedBeanPHP index page https://redbeanphp.com/index.php?p=/welcome#sponsor
  51. ↑ BitTorrent Enhancement Proposal #1: The BEP Process https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0001.html
  52. ↑ "Polars - About us". 2024-04-07. https://pola.rs/about-us/. 
  53. ↑ "Lightning Governance — PyTorch Lightning 2.3.0dev documentation". https://lightning.ai/docs/pytorch/latest/community/governance.html. 
  54. ↑ "Addressing the Future of ABAP: The Power of Open Source". 2024-06-06. https://abapconf.org/. 
  55. ↑ "GitHub FastAPI". 2024-07-30. https://tiangolo.com/github-fastapi/. 
  56. ↑ "Proposal Process". 2019-03-31. https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/PROPOSAL-PROCESS.md. 
  57. ↑ "ankitects Github organization". https://github.com/orgs/ankitects/people. 
  58. ↑ "Anki development discussion". https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/lqf561/since_anki_is_opensource_why_doesnt_it_have_more/?rdt=46989. 



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