Why Block handed Goose to the Linux Foundation
Internal tools can become powerful external services. Such was the case with Amazon’s cloud, which became AWS. And so too with Goose, Block’s coding agent, which it open-sourced after rolling it out to all its employees.
The release of Goose to the broader technology community under a permissive license was not the end of the story, however.
The New Stack spoke with Manik Surtani, the newly appointed CTO and co-founder of the Agentic AI Foundation, and former head of open-source at Block, the well-known fintech company, at an MCP developer event to learn more.
“Goose wasn’t entirely free and open, as Block still owned its trademarks, hampering enterprise adoption.”
Santani told The New Stack that after releasing Goose to the public and seeing rapid early adoption, Block started to experience “some headwinds.” The biggest issue the team encountered was a lack of transparency in governance for the Goose project, Surtani explains. Goose wasn’t entirely free and open, as Block still owned its trademarks, hampering enterprise adoption. Something had to change if Goose would be able to fully unfurl its wings and soar.
The answer to the governance issue was to give Goose to a foundation. But which one? After speaking with the MCP team, the Goose Crew, and the fine folks behind Model Context Protocol at Anthropic, we decided to link arms and help found the Agentic AI Foundation. The AAIF today is an arm of the larger Linux Foundation, and is replete with both corporate (see our chats with the AWS crew helping guide MCP for more) and developer buy-in.
“…launching the foundation with the trio of tools was partially due to expediency, a desire to get the group up and running.”
Goose, MCP, and Agents.MD formed the early core of the AAIF, but Surtani said that launching the foundation with the trio of tools was partially due to expediency, a desire to get the group up and running. For more on what could join the group under the AAIF umbrella, how Goose was initially coded, and more, hit play!
Further Reading: How Block Got 12,000 Employees Using AI Agents in Two Months
