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Benevolent Dictator For Life?

The term benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is popular in the open source world1, mainly as a way to acknowledge the importance of the person leading a particular project into early success and giving that person absolute rule.

But there are no benevolent dictators. Recent developments in the Wordpress world brought me back to my TYPO3 days of long ago.

Benevolent dictator?

I am uncomfortable with the term "benevolent dictator for life". It is too close to a personality cult, where the dictator and the project become one. It leads to suppression of dissent, and single-person control of infrastructure at crucial moments.

For a while, I could pretend that governance of software projects and governance of the world were different things. But "we shape our tools, and our tools shape us2". That interaction is a problem, with dictators on either side.

Some twenty years ago, I worked with several open source content management systems for websites. Most web hosting offered services based on the PHP programming language, with three main contenders:

  • Wordpress, led by Matt Mullenweg: easiest for small business or personal websites, with a focus on user experience.
  • Drupal, led by Dries Buytaert: stronger on the developer experience to adapt it to different use cases.
  • TYPO3, led by Kasper Skårhøj: best for more complex content management workflows and multi-lingual content in larger organisations.

TYPO3, 2007

I preferred the leadership of Kasper (TYPO3), the least known of the three individuals3. Around 2007 he actively withstood being named BDFL, and handed over governance of the project to the community.

I sat in on discussions in the Dutch TYPO3 community on how to proceed: how to make it more led by companies and individuals, in a more democratic and pluralistic way. We had plenty of discussions on who benefits and who contributes.

Having such community-led discussions about governance slows the project down a bit. But also defines the culture and expectations within the community.

Wordpress, 2025

At the end of 2024, the BDFL of Wordpress fought publicly with a major hosting provider over (financial) project contributions. This led to discussions around governance and leadership: several people and organisations with critical voices were cut off the project infrastructure, and could no longer provide services to clients.

Some prominent people in the Wordpress community tried to set up FAIR, an alternative and decentralised way to distribute software. And set up governance in a similar new way.

They concluded it is not viable (see later). Many players in the world of Wordpress are not willing to commit to a new model of governance. They prefer the status quo over taking risk.

At a crucial stage of forming the community norms, the choice was made for dictatorship. Dissent became a risk. Contributing resources to the common cause became transactional.

Next?

Guess who did adopt the FAIR approach?

Joost de Valk: "FAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop"

At Cloudfest’s hackathon this year, we’ll work on making FAIR work with and for TYPO3. The TYPO3 community and technical leadership sees a lot of value in the system that was created, because the technical project actually delivered a good, technically solid, federated package management system.

There are, obviously, parallels to the current world of politics. We need to work on the commons and on (digital) independence and choice.

We benefit from strong voices to show us a way forward. That is leadership. But directing towards a view for the future is not the same as making decisions.

Not every dictator leads. Not every leader dictates.

  1. Benevolent dictator for life on Wikipedia ↩

  2. Quote Investigator has quite some research on the quote "we shape our tools, and our tools shape us". ↩

  3. Kasper's page on Wikipedia only exists in German and Russian ↩