There are no benevolent dictators.

People who are serious about building community will put their trust in others. They will delegate. They will listen to advice. They will compromise. They will be imperfect; they will fail to do the best thing for the community from time to time. But when that happens, more often than not, they will listen and adapt to criticism. We may still call them BDFL. But they aren't truly a dictator.

People building petty fiefdoms will inevitably betray the community.

When I read about Mullenweg, something I'm struck by is his cry bullying. I see him responding to complaints like, "are you threatening me? I get a lot of death threats." I bet he does get death threats, and to be clear it's not okay that he and other public figures have their lives threatened.

But it's common for him to respond to people telling him to go to hell as if they were making an actionable threat. See [0]. I would be upset if someone hoped I "[died] a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." But I would know they were being hyperbolic and flipping me the bird, not making a threat. (Especially if I was familiar with Tumblr's culture and the texture of humor on the platform. Like you might expect from the CEO.)

And I certainly wouldn't respond by doxing them. And this is really important; doxing someone is actually putting them in jeopardy, with no hyperbole. Doxing someone is an actionable threat of harassment. This is a betrayal of the community's trust, and the exercise of power against the community's interests.

I've seen some other examples of him mischaracterizing insults (including milder ones than this) as threats, but I wasn't able to find them in my timebox. These were screenshots from Twitter and possibly Slack, presumably I could find them if I had accounts on those platforms.

You can also look at the recent controversy as an exercise in cry bullying. "WP Engine is so unfair to the community," he cries. "They deprive people of the essential feature of having more than 3 revisions without changing a setting." Then cuts a large subset of the community off from things that are actually critical, like logging in and updating plugins. He betrayed the community and exercised his leadership position to prosecute his personal quarrels at the community's expense.

I apologize if this was a rant, but here's the point. We should be thinking harder about open source governance, because there are no benevolent dictators. Positions of power corrupt, and they also attract the corrupt to them. When BBS operators were powerful in our community, they attracted (at least one) con artist(s) [1]; now we see a BDFL using our community to rule as a petty tyrant.

When we want to adopt an up and coming project, we should ask the BDFL what the plan is for turning over power to democratic mechanisms in the community. When a new project starts only 1 or few people are there to make decisions, so a BDFL is the natural state of things. But we should expect governance to become more sophisticated as a project becomes more important.

We should learn to recognize the rhetorical mechanism a petty tyrant uses to conflate their interests with the interests of the community. Be suspicious of them. Push back. Ultimately, there are two mechanisms to hold a petty tyrant accountable; forking and rewriting. We should be prepared to do that.

Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in the ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good response to.

Another objection I don't have an answer to is the very real issues projects like Redis and Elasticache have encountered, where platform giants capture the value without contributing back financially. That's a real problem I'm not smart enough to solve, and it does complicate what I'm suggesting.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0