[detaro]

Finding a "full" BDFL that's not the original founder seems quite difficult: who's gonna have that level of respect and authority, can trust on having it even in the face of conflict and is willing to do the job after seeing it not work out for the project founder? Some communities might have such a candidate (e.g. in Linux maybe one of Linus' lieutenants?), but many won't. Questions of legitimation and ways of replacing them are gonna come up, and if you don't codify the answers are gonna come up again and again. If you codify them, you now have an election mechanism, a "vote of no confidence" mechanism, ... specified, and aren't that far from an elected leadership. Given the amount of work it is and conflicting interests in the community, does it then really make sense to have that leadership be one person?

One of the proposals was for a elected "technical lead" (or Gracious Umpire Influencing Decisions Officer (GUIDO)) with 4.5-year terms, and came sixth in the vote about options: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8010/#the-role-of-the-gu...