Benevolent Dictator for Life

Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) is an informal title given to certain individuals in the open source software developer community who are tasked with assigning general guidelines and, in certain situations, final decisions within the scope of a project. The translation of Benevolent Dictator for Life is Benevolent Dictator For Life, which involves a bit of informality and humor.

In 1995 Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, was the first person to receive this distinction.

The term "Benevolent Dictator for Life" was coined by Python programmer Guido van Rossum, who styled himself "BDFL" for Python development. In the free software community, the role of BDFL is seen as an effective way to make quick and unified decisions, allowing a project to grow and evolve more efficiently.

However, there are also criticisms of the BDFL concept, as some people argue that the absolute control of a single person can limit the creativity and innovation of the project. Additionally, the nature of BDFL can create an unhealthy dependency on a single person, which can be detrimental to the project in the long run.

Note the difference with its historical meaning used in a political context.^{[citation required]}

List of some BDFLs

• Adrian Bowyer founder and leader of the RepRap project.
• Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss in Django; on 13 January 2014, they implicitly declined in the source code of the project.
• Alexandre Julliard Wine maintainer (Windows API free library).
• Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell in Samba (free implementation of NetBios protocol).
• Dries Buytaert founder and leader of the Drupal project (CMS).
• Fabien Potencier, creator of Symfony.
• Guido van Rossum creator of Python, declined such honor on July 12, 2018.
• Hans Reiser in ReiserFS.
• Jimbo Wales Wikipedia creator.
• Josef Drexler at TTDPatch.
• Larry Wall in Perl.
• Daniel Robbins in Funtoo Linux
• Linus Torvalds Linux kernel creator.
• Mark Shuttleworth himself is called the "Auto-Named Life Benevolent Dictator," or SABDFL (English) "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" and the Ubuntu community often use this name to refer to it.
• Matt Mullenweg on WordPress.
• Pablo "Zaskar" Novara de PSeInt.
• Patrick Volkerding, Slackware creator, a Linux distribution.
• Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP creator.
• Theo de Raadt in the OpenBSD project.
• Ton Roosendaal de Blender (3D modeling application).
• Taylor Otwell creator of Laravel.
• Bram Moolenaar, creator of Vim.

Benevolent Dictator

We understand a benevolent dictator to be that person who has the final authority to make decisions, due to his personality or experience, and applies it daily with rational use for the benefit of a specific community or family.

This concept should not be associated with the cliché of a dictator who makes decisions by force or without common consensus. Benevolent dictators do not actually make the decisions, they let things flow freely, wait for an exchange of ideas, and through experience, reasoning and reflection try to reach an agreement. If this is not achieved, the benevolent dictator has enough experience to be able to make a final decision that will benefit society.

On the other hand, in many cases the dictator will have to delegate responsibility for decision-making to whoever he considers qualified to execute it.

One of the characteristics that unites dictators is their rejection of making decisions without being consensual and understood by all members of society, to which they usually say “that's how it has to be”, in the sense that it is the best for you and for society because I have already known it through experience.

Being a benevolent dictator requires special delicacy when addressing the community. First of all, when the conversation begins, the dictator allows the individuals in the society to express their opinions freely, leaving their constructive opinions for last so that the members of the community do not feel influenced. Although in some cases, the dictator may make mistakes, but that does not mean he loses his credibility.

It is important that the dictator be the entrepreneur of the project. That you have the skills, such as technical competence or the ability to persuade, to be able to lead the project and that the members of society trust your ideas. Thus the project will be centralized since their knowledge and skills are accepted by the group. But on the other hand, if there is no candidate with sufficient credibility, it is better that the project be decentralized in decision-making.