Benevolent Dictator For Life or
BDFL is a title given to a small number of
open source software developmentOpen source software development is the process by which open source software is developed. These are software products “available with its source code and under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design”...
leaders. The term was coined in 1995 to refer to
Guido van RossumGuido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...
, creator of the
Python programming languagePython is a general-purpose high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
. The BDFL resolves disputes or competing arguments within the community. The title originated shortly after van Rossum joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). It first appeared on a follow-up mail by
Ken ManheimerKen Manheimer has been a prominent software developer of Zope and GNU Mailman who worked for NIST, CNRI, Digital Creations and Zope Corporation. He's been listed by Guido van Rossum together with Barry Warsaw as the probable inventor of the term Benevolent Dictator For Life ....
to a meeting trying to create a semi-formal group overseeing Python development and workshops.
BDFL should not be confused with the more common term for open source leaders, "
benevolent dictatorThe benevolent dictator is a more modern version of enlightened absolutism, being an undemocratic or authoritarian leader who exercises his or her political power for the benefit of the people rather than exclusively for his or her own self-interest or benefit, or for the benefit of only a small...
", which was popularized by
Eric Raymond'sEric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His name became known within the hacker culture when he was self-appointed maintainer of the "Jargon File" since 1990...
essay
Homesteading the NoosphereHomesteading the Noosphere , an essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the social workings of open-source software development, follows his influential piece "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" ....
.
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Benevolent Dictator For Life or
BDFL is a title given to a small number of
open source software developmentOpen source software development is the process by which open source software is developed. These are software products “available with its source code and under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design”...
leaders. The term was coined in 1995 to refer to
Guido van RossumGuido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...
, creator of the
Python programming languagePython is a general-purpose high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
. The BDFL resolves disputes or competing arguments within the community. The title originated shortly after van Rossum joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). It first appeared on a follow-up mail by
Ken ManheimerKen Manheimer has been a prominent software developer of Zope and GNU Mailman who worked for NIST, CNRI, Digital Creations and Zope Corporation. He's been listed by Guido van Rossum together with Barry Warsaw as the probable inventor of the term Benevolent Dictator For Life ....
to a meeting trying to create a semi-formal group overseeing Python development and workshops.
BDFL should not be confused with the more common term for open source leaders, "
benevolent dictatorThe benevolent dictator is a more modern version of enlightened absolutism, being an undemocratic or authoritarian leader who exercises his or her political power for the benefit of the people rather than exclusively for his or her own self-interest or benefit, or for the benefit of only a small...
", which was popularized by
Eric Raymond'sEric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His name became known within the hacker culture when he was self-appointed maintainer of the "Jargon File" since 1990...
essay
Homesteading the NoosphereHomesteading the Noosphere , an essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the social workings of open-source software development, follows his influential piece "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" ....
. Among other topics related to
hacker cultureIn one of several meanings of the word in computing, a hacker is a member of the computer programmer subculture originated in the 1960s in the United States academia, in particular around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Tech Model Railroad Club and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
, Raymond elaborates on how the nature of open source forces the "dictatorship" to keep itself benevolent, since a strong disagreement can lead to the
forkingIn software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software....
of the project under the rule of new leaders.
Examples of people sometimes so entitled
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...
, creator of Python
- Larry Wall
Larry Wall is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.- Education :Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976....
, the creator of PerlPerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA, in 1987, as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone...
- Patrick Volkerding
Patrick Volkerding is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. He is the "Slackware Benevolent Dictator for Life." Volkerding earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993.For a short while, Chris Lumens and others have...
, the creator of SlackwareSlackware is a free and open source operating system. It is one of the earliest Linux distributions and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993...
- Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Richard Shuttleworth is a South African entrepreneur who was the second self-funded space tourist. Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd...
calls himself the "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life", or SABDFL, and the UbuntuUbuntu , is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution. It is named after the South African ethical ideology Ubuntu and is distributed as free and open source software. Ubuntu provides an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on...
community often uses this name to refer to him
- Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovaty is an American Web developer, journalist and entrepreneur living in Chicago, Illinois. He is co-creator of the Django Web framework and a noted advocate of "journalism via computer programming."...
and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, for Django
- Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert is an open-source software programmer and the founder and lead of the Drupal CMS. Buytaert defended his PhD dissertation in Computer Science on January 27, 2008 at the University of Ghent in Belgium....
, founder and leader of the DrupalDrupal is a free and open source Content Management System written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and knowledge management uses to large corporate and political sites...
project
- Matt Mullenweg
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California.He is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and writes a popular blog , a domain hack...
, the creator of WordPressWordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the successor to b2/cafelog. It is powered by PHP and a SQL data backend...
- Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator and leader of the Hudson
Hudson is a continuous integration tool written in Java, which runs in a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat or the GlassFish application server...
project