Writing Free Software is very different from writing proprietary software for a huge software company like Google or Facebook – the team size, incentives, and likelihood of turnover are all completely different – and, as a result, the ideal languages are very different as well. Or at least, this was the thesis for my 2021 FOSDEM talk "Imagining the Ideal Language for Writing Free Software".

Over the past year, however, I've concluded that this argument – while correct any many areas – does not apply to dependency management. When it comes to dependency management, writing Free Software isn't on the opposite end of the spectrum from writing code for Google — it's on the same end, but even further along. This talk will elaborate on what I mean by that statement and discuss the implication I believe that this has for Raku.