It's the best, when you find one. But the approach is also the riskiest. You may not even pick a BDFL to begin with (I'm sure many of us can name certain repos overly held back by a bad or muddy vision, or being overly conservative with feature/pull requests) . or that B fades away for any number of factors. Committees sacrifice that cohesive vision and agility for being able to have some checks to potential rouge actors.
> Braam really took Neovim personally and got better at getting stuff into vim that he wouldn't merge before once neovim was arround as a competitor. I really lost track of vim in the last years because neovim is just a solid platform with an active community.
I think that's the answer - the specific makeup of any given team isn't as relevant as competition which spurs competitors to either keep up or the more successful upstarts to take over.
> or being overly conservative with feature/pull requests
We saw some complaints about a repo like this I forget for what project some weeks back here on HN and it came down to, people dropping a PR and then the maintainer left holding the bag if something goes wrong, having to maintain someone else's code, which can become a problem if its a completely new feature they didn't implement or want, but users wanted. The other case is, they fix a bug, then disappear, so if the maintainer has feedback, now they have to take time to check out the person's code, update it, out of their current planned work.
I wonder if more open source projects would benefit from adding plugin architecture so people can do those one-off features as plugins without "tainting" the core project.
Honestly in open source I'd argue it's not. If an OSS project has significant usage, if BDFL struggles/etc - community forks can put the project back on pace. NeoVim is the classic (successful) example that gave us a great alternative while also nudging the BDFL into the modern age.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people infiltrate projects with the intent of sabotaging them. This may be done by causing a controversy, or else making bad technical decisions on purpose.
