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   Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 01:44:35 JST Karl Fogel

   in reply to

   @koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter I've most often heard the phrase "Benevolent Dictator For Life" used to refer to founding leaders of open source software projects, and in that context there is a built-in mitigation of the dangers of a BDFL: freedom to fork.

   At this point my best option is to quote myself, so... no point being embarrassed about it I guess! Here we go:

   The potential for forks is the reason there are no true dictators in free software projects. This may seem like a surprising claim, considering how common it is to hear someone called the "dictator" (sometimes softened to "benevolent dictator") in a given open source project. But this kind of dictatorship is special, quite different from our conventional understanding of the word. Imagine a ruler whose subjects could copy her entire territory at any time and move to the copy to rule as they see fit. Would not such a ruler govern very differently from one whose subjects were bound to stay under her rule no matter what she did?