Benevolent Dictator for Life

Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) is an informal title, sometimes used humorously, given to an individual in an open source development community, who is usually also the founder or originator of the project. The term was first coined by Eric Raymond in his book Homesteading the Noosphere, referring to a structure where "a project has multiple co-maintainers working under a single 'benevolent dictator' who owns the project" .

According to Raymond, who cites Emacs and Linux as examples of open source project led by a "benevolent dictator," this dictator is usually the owner or maintainer of the project, and his dictatorship is mainly used to solve the 'who decides' problem in the open source project.

Some examples of "benevolent dictators" are Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel, Guido van Rossum for the Python programming language, and Larry Wall for the Perl programming language.

See also: List of Benevolent Dictators for Life