A very widespread system for organising people is to have a single responsible decision-maker, supported, monitored and advised by a committee. We see that through politics and business, and a lot of the best open source projects seem to do the same thing.

Many of those, including Linux as far as I know, simply started as projects that were driven by single authors with a strong vision and remarkable diligence.

Then people flocked to those projects, but with the understanding and appreciation of that vision.

I don’t think any of them wanted to be BDFLs for the sake of power. They were the original authors and _made_ something useful. I don’t think any of them took over an existing project and declared themselves dictators. Ironically they all would be way too opinionated to do so.