Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL)

Benevolent Dictator For Life (commonly known as "BDFL") is a title sometimes given to an individual inside open source development teams. Such person, usually the project founder, is responsible for defining the general rules and development paths in the project as well as, on some situation, committing final decisions regarding critical project issues. This terms has been taken from the Monty Python film series and firstly used in the Open Source Software community to humorously refer to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language. (Source: Wikipedia:Benevolent_Dictator_For_Life, 2008-07-07)

Update: at the community summit Berlin in Sep 2008 we have posed to not use the role of BDFL. See: TWikiGovernanceStructure.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny, ArthurClemens - 07 Sep 2008

Discussions

Older discussions accessible at rev 16 of this topic.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Sep 2008