Benevolent Dictator For Life

Benevolent Dictator For Life or BDFL is a title given to a small number of open source software development leaders. The term was coined in 1995 to refer to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language. 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 Manheimer 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 dictator", which was popularized by Eric Raymond's essay Homesteading the Noosphere. Among other topics related to hacker culture, Raymond elaborates on how the nature of open source forces the "dictatorship" to keep itself benevolent, since a strong disagreement can lead to the forking of the project under the rule of new leaders.

Examples of people sometimes so entitled

• Guido van Rossum, creator of Python
• Larry Wall, the creator of Perl
• Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux Kernel
• Patrick Volkerding, the creator of Slackware
• Mark Shuttleworth calls himself the "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life", or SABDFL, and the Ubuntu community often uses this name to refer to him
• Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, for Django
• Dries Buytaert, founder and leader of the Drupal project
• Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator and leader of the Hudson project
• Brian Aker, creator and leader of the Drizzle project
• Woody Gilk, the creator and co-founder of Kohana^{[citation needed]}