BDFL

Every open source project eventually hits a moment where someone has to make a call nobody agreed on in advance — and governance is the system that determines who has the authority to make it. This post walks through every major governance model in plain language, from BDFLs and do-ocracies to lazy consensus and multi-stakeholder consortia, including how mature projects like Kubernetes layer several models at once. MkDocs is included as a real-world example of what happens when governance gets skipped entirely.