BDFL considered (potentially) harmful – Dynamic Typing

Ideally, you’ll find that the founders of your project transferred the trademarks and copyrights to a well-organized, transparently managed, public-benefit foundation. BDFLs like Guido van Rossum (Python), Larry Wall (Perl), and Alex Limi and Alan Runyan (Plone) earned their “benevolent” titles with great code, good leadership, and by irrevocably conveying key intellectual property rights to foundations that limited their authority. Their authority in their projects is largely moral. BDFL in these cases translates to “dictator for life — so long as benevolent.”

Despite defaulting to believing "it's not the individual people it's the systems", i'm really quite happy with the Dries exception. I'm wondering how well those projects listed are truly working out and how they match what Drupal needs. Still, it would be really, really fantastic to get the Drupal Association to the point of awesomeness where everyone, including Dries, trusts it even more than Dries. I think that's clearly where we have to work, as it is already the most important thing– it owns the infrastructure of the project, which is crucial, and if strong could continue even in the worst-case-scenario trademark dispute.

[tip: link via Jack Aponte on twitter]