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The trick with BDFL is, of course, lucking into a suitably B BD, and hanging onto them for as much L as possible. And benevolence is not an attribute that can
by Karellen 5y ago
The trick with BDFL is, of course, lucking into a suitably B BD, and hanging onto them for as much L as possible.
And benevolence is not an attribute that can be passed to one's successor.
Torvalds and Jobs have done well, but are examples of survivorship bias. What about all the software projects helmed by autocratic douchebag dictators which never went anywhere because they were unable to attract enough contributors to feed the dictator's ego to the point where the community became self-sustaining?
Debian's been going longer than a lot of other software projects, and kept going after the initial founder(s) left the project. The process is messy, sure, but it sure seems sustainable so far.
- kibwen 5y agoPrecisely. Everyone adores a caring and benevolent dictator. The problem is that the sort of personality traits that inspire someone to pursue a position of power make it overwhelmingly likely that your dictator will be malevolent rather than benevolent. There's a reason that examples of effective BDFLs arise from cases where the dictator was in place before the project became popular. The other problem is the continuity of leadership. Despite its flaws, one of the strengths of democracy is that the code paths for the transition of power are explicit and regularly exercised. The only reason that anybody has any faith in any potential replacement for Torvalds is that, presumably, Torvalds will hand-pick his inevitable successor. But the successor's inevitable successor will have none of the same legitimacy, and by that time (be it decades from now) I expect the project to transition away from a BDFL model out of necessity.